Impacts of shared mobility on vehicle lifetimes and on the carbon footprint of electric vehicles
Journal article, 2022

Shared cars will likely have larger annual vehicle driving distances than individually owned cars. This may accelerate passenger car retirement. Here we develop a semi-empirical lifetime-driving intensity model using statistics on Swedish vehicle retirement. This semi-empirical model is integrated with a carbon footprint model, which considers future decarbonization pathways. In this work, we show that the carbon footprint depends on the cumulative driving distance, which depends on both driving intensity and calendar aging. Higher driving intensities generally result in lower carbon footprints due to increased cumulative driving distance over the vehicle’s lifetime. Shared cars could decrease the carbon footprint by about 41% in 2050, if one shared vehicle replaces ten individually owned vehicles. However, potential empty travel by autonomous shared vehicles—the additional distance traveled to pick up passengers—may cause carbon footprints to increase. Hence, vehicle durability and empty travel should be considered when designing low-carbon car sharing systems.

electric vehicles

shared vehicles

car sharing systems

carbon footprint

vehicle retirement

Author

Johannes Morfeldt

Chalmers, Space, Earth and Environment, Physical Resource Theory

Daniel Johansson

Chalmers, Space, Earth and Environment, Physical Resource Theory

Nature Communications

2041-1723 (ISSN) 20411723 (eISSN)

Vol. 13 1 6400

Vehicle lifetime in different mobility solutions

Chalmers, 2020-01-01 -- .

Next generation of AdVanced InteGrated Assessment modelling to support climaTE policy making (Navigate)

European Commission (EC) (EC/H2020/821124), 2019-09-01 -- 2023-08-31.

MISTRA Carbon Exit Phase 2

The Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research (Mistra) (MISTRACarbonExitPhase2), 2021-07-01 -- 2025-03-31.

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Areas of Advance

Transport

Subject Categories

Transport Systems and Logistics

Infrastructure Engineering

Vehicle Engineering

DOI

10.1038/s41467-022-33666-2

PubMed

36302850

More information

Latest update

10/27/2023