Shared Automated Electric Vehicle Prospects for Low Carbon Road Transportation in British Columbia, Canada

Orhan Atabay,Curran Crawford,Ned Djilali

doi:10.3390/vehicles4010007

Abstract

This study explores the long-term energy use implications of electrification, automation and sharing of road vehicles in British Columbia, Canada. Energy use is first analyzed for the years 1990–2016 for forward forecasting, and hypothetical scenarios ranging from conservative to disruptive, incorporating various effects of road vehicle electrification, sharing and automation, as well as influences of other technology disruptions, such as online shopping and e-learning are presented and used to project the road transportation energy use in B.C. to 2060. Transportation energy use projections are compared to those of the Canadian Energy Regulator (CER). When considering only the effect of vehicle electrification, the scenarios show higher energy savings compared to CER’s scenarios. The combined impact of vehicle electrification and automation leads to decreased energy use to 2060 for all scenarios considered. The energy savings for all scenarios, except for the conservative one, are higher than CER’s projections. When the effects of vehicle electrification, automation and sharing are merged, all scenarios yield energy savings beyond the CER projections. Inclusion of other technology disruptions and the effects of pandemics like COVID-19 reduce transportation demand and provide further energy savings. The BAU scenario given in this study shows energy use decreases compared to 2016 of 26.3%, 49%, 62.24%, 72.1% for the years 2030, 2040, 2050, and 2060 respectively.

Highlights

A host of auto, AI, and internet companies are pursuing the development and demonstration of autonomous vehicles (AV’s) with the anticipations that they and the supporting infrastructure will become sufficiently reliable and affordable and eventually displace most manually driven cars
We focus on travel-based energy use implications of vehicle automation and sharing as in [4], since lifecycle impacts of vehicle automation and sharing are expected to be smaller in magnitude
The cumulative impact of the scenarios applied in this study show decreasing tendencies for energy use, if vehicle automation and sharing is adopted in parallel to vehicle powertrain electrification using renewable energy sources

Summary

Introduction

A host of auto, AI, and internet companies are pursuing the development and demonstration of autonomous vehicles (AV’s) with the anticipations that they and the supporting infrastructure will become sufficiently reliable and affordable and eventually displace most manually driven cars. Automated vehicles (AV’s) perform driving tasks without the control of a human operator, depending on their autonomy level. Connected vehicles (CV’s) can communicate with other vehicles in traffic (V2V, vehicle to vehicle communication), with surrounding infrastructure (V2I, vehicle to infrastructure communication) and with clouds and computer server systems (V2C). This information sharing (IoV, Internet of Vehicles) has the aim of providing important benefits in terms of finding optimal driving conditions, patterns, and routes. Shared vehicles (SV’s) enable new transportation modes, aiming to reduce vehicle ownership rates and cost of vehicle kms travelled. Electrified powertrains of battery electric vehicles (BEV), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (P-HEV’s), and (plug-in) fuel-cell electric vehicles (P-FCEV’s) make it possible to use renewable energy and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions

Methods

Results

Conclusion