Governments of many countries consider the electrification of individual passenger transport as
a suitable strategy to decrease oil dependency and reduce transport-related carbon dioxide
(CO2) and air pollutant emissions. However battery-electric vehicles (BEVs) and plug-in
hybrid-electric vehicles (PHEVs) have been more expensive than their conventional counterparts
and suffer from relatively short electric driving ranges which still hampers the market
potential of these vehicles. Despite persisting shortfalls mechanisms such as technological
learning and economics of scale promise to improve the techno-economic performance of BEVs and
PHEVs in the short- to mid-term. Here the author seeks to obtain insight into the
techno-economic prospects of BEVs and PHEVs by: (i) establishing experience curves and (ii)
quantifying user costs and the costs of mitigating carbon dioxide and air pollutant emissions
in a time-series analysis. The analysis captures the situation in Germany between 2010 and
2016.
