Will Diesel dominance in EU be replaced by EVs?

Europe's car fleets have been persistently transformed from being petrol-driven to diesel-driven over the last 20 years. The EU average for diesel new car sales is 55%, with Spain and France as high as 70%.

According to leading automotive engineers the dominance of diesel engines in Europe’s new car market could be over before the end of the decade. A combination of increasingly stringent emissions regulations and the high cost of new-generation anti-pollution technology will make diesel engines much more expensive along with the high possibility of significant rises in the price of diesel fuel making them more expensive to run.

Joe Bakaj, head of product development for Ford of Europe said “It is much cheaper to get petrol engines through EU6.2; with diesel engines we need technology such as selective catalyst reduction systems, and costs increase again with heavier vehicles.”

Will EVs fill the void? With the average cost of fuel across the EU approx € 1.50 / liter (US $8 /US Gallon), those prices have driven european motorists to sacrifice the performance of a petrol engine for sluggishness and jack-hammer like soundtrack of a diesel engine in search of 10-20% fuel efficiency improvements.

Based on these motives, if a 10-20% fuel saving can generate 50-70% market share of new car sales, then a 95% energy cost saving running a plug-in electric car has the potential to take over significantly more than 70% market share.

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Shell: "By 2070, the passenger road market could be nearly oil-free" [VIDEO]

According to the 2013 Shell Lens Scenarios, which tries to predict what the world’s energy dependence could look like in 2100, by 2070 we could be living oil free.

There are lots of factors that went into this prediction, such as increased urbanization, more efficient urban planning, and regulations on CO2 emissions. But the people at Shell believed these factors were so powerful that it made the following claim: the rise in the use of electricity and hydrogen as transportation fuels will result in oil having a meagre 22% of the global transportation market by 2060. It further claims:

By 2070, the passenger road market could be nearly oil-free

Shell lumps electric and hydrogen into the same group, which they project will have a 60% market share by 2060. Shell has a vested interest in pushing the hydrogen barrow as they and Total are currently the only two major oil companies that have stated they are actively developing hydrogen based fueling technology for vehicles.

The rest of the oil industry does not seem to share Shell's opinion. BP predicted in Feb 2012 that electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids, will make up only 4 percent of the global fleet by 2030 while Exxon said electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids and vehicles that run on natural gas would make up only 5 percent of the fleet by 2040.

Let's hope big oil are only trying to fool themselves with these predictions. In the chart below Shell don't see EV's reaching 10% market share until approx 2035, over two and a half decades after the first mass produced EVs were launched, yet some markets are approaching 10% now.

If market trends in Norway, the third largest oil exporting nation in the world, are an accurate leading indicator, fully-fledged electric cars have already captured a market share of 9.1 per cent, so even Shell's time scale looks very conservative.

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Ten Bucks a Litre - Dick Smith Documentary cherry picks the facts [VIDEO]

A recently aired Australian documentary by local eccentric millionaire Dick Smith about alternatives to fossil fuels has stirred quite a hornets nest of feedback, both positive and negative.

While on the whole the Doco was fairly interesting and we here at EV News noted Dick's enthusiasm for electric cars, some facts seem to have been seriously cherry picked.

The EV segment starts @47 mins with Dick enthusing about an EV powered only by renewables and which has Vehicle to Grid Technology (V2G) that can held smooth the intermittency of renewable energy.

The cherry picking starts @50 mins when to close the segment Dick holds up a flask containing 1 litre of fuel stating that it weighs 700 grams and will take an average car approx 10 km. The bad news for EV's, we are told, is that the equivalent battery would weigh 25x as much! End of argument apparently and the story moves onto bio-fuels.

What Dick failed to mention was that the equivalent of that 1 litre of fuel (10 kWh) stored in an EV battery can propel an electric car 10x as far (100 km)... surely a worthy trade-off in energy efficiency Dick?

Of course, battery power may not be a solution for his Helicopter any time soon but Dick was so impressed with EVs he is now the proud owner of a solar powered Nissan Leaf.

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