What Drives You?

By: Victor Garza
          The race to finding a way to achieve the mitigation goals for global climate change is on. Coincidentally, personal vehicles play as big a role in this race as they would in others. While transportation only accounts for 13% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, the main concern of the general public is whether or not there is a trade-off to having a cleaner vehicle in exchange for a more costly price. The goal in mind is to limit global warming to less than 2°C above preindustrial temperatures so creating targets for requirements by the years 2030, 2040, and 2050 is done. Next, the carbon intensities and consumer costs of 125 different light-duty vehicles (LDVs) are acquired. Included in this collection are internal-combustion-engine vehicles (ICEV), non-plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (HEV), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV), and battery electric vehicles (BEV). The results of this study came out to show that while the emissions and costs vary considerably among the 125 vehicle models, the lower emissions in the alternative powertrain technology vehicles (HEVs, PHEVs, and BEVs) correspond to lower costs. At the same time, the alternative powertrain technology vehicles are more likely to help in staying below the target temperature goals. With this in mind, the negative stigma that cleaner vehicles and technologies are more costly to the consumer should be dismissed. In order to mitigate the goals for the year 2050, a more widespread use of the BEVs should help to stay within the frame for this target. Although this study only went over LDVs, there are those with heavy-duty vehicles that might not want to exchange power of their engines for a cleaner motor vehicle despite the benefits in cost. However, in order to reach the mitigation goals for global climate change, more and more consumers will have to start switching over to more emissions and cost-efficient vehicles.

 

Figure 1: Where different models of vehicles fall into the spectrum of greenhouse gas emissions and consumer costs.

 Reference:

Miotti, Marco, Supran, Geoffrey J., Kim, Ella J., Trancik, Jessika E. 2016. Personal Vehicles Evaluated against Climate Change Mitigation Targets. Environ. Sci. Technol. 50:10795-10804.