Voitures électriques : les véhicules de demain

According to the WWF report, the link between fossil fuels and transportation, which has been "locked in" for the past century due to infrastructural developments and the influence of large oil companies and automotive manufacturers, has to be broken. 

"Automotive transport is ripe for transformational change," it claims, and this cannot be achieved solely by finding new sources of carbonaceous material to liquefy, it says, warning that hydrogen or biofuels could do as much environmental damage as crude oil from conventional wells. 

Instead, it says, the future lies in battery electric cars, which, though "relatively immature", can be "over 60% more energy efficient than today's conventional ICEV (internal combustion engined vehicles), across the entire plant-to-wheels life-cycle". 

What's more, the increased efficiency of the electric powertrain occurs whichever source of energy (crude oil, natural gas, coal or biomass) is used to power the grid it uses, the study finds. 

The NGO adds: "Considering the potential for technological advances over time – which will inevitably favour the less developed electric powertrain – this efficiency advantage is likely to increase." 

But it stresses that this will not be possible without strong policies "to dismantle market barriers to superior technologies, and to remove hidden and overt subsidies which perpetuate the liquids paradigm at the expense of competition". 

It also recommends that all vehicles should be subject to energy labelling and efficiency improvement requirements similar to any other energy-consuming appliance. For instance, it says liquid-based measures of fuel economy (litres per 100km) should be replaced with technology-neutral indicators of energy consumed per kilometre. 

Lastly, it says, incentives are needed to encourage customers to make the right choices, including exemptions from tolls or charging schemes or providing 'green car' drivers with access to priority lanes. 

Car manufacturers say they are not against the introduction of alternative technologies, pointing to the fact that electric cars have been available for more than a decade. But, they stress that many highly CO2-efficient cars have met with very low demand. 

"We need to sell the products that consumers want," the Association of Automobile Manufacturers' (ACEA) spokeswoman Sigrid de Vries told EurActiv. 

ACEA Director of Environment and Economics Rolf Stromberger agreed that the challenge is "to develop a stage of technical maturity which is acceptable for the customer – as they do not accept comfort deficits – and, if possible, with no additional costs compared to existing technologies". 

Technical challenges linked to heavy and large batteries, which increase weight and create space and durability problems must also be resolved, Stromberger told EurActiv. 

He nevertheless believes that electric vehicles are "one option for future mobility and they will find their market". But this, he believes, is likely to remain confined to "certain utilisation behaviours" such as short distance travelling, where infrastructure to recharge the batteries can be made available. 

While he agrees that electric vehicles can have higher efficiencies compared to conventional internal combustion engines, he insists that general statements cannot be made because it depends which car type you compare and how the fuel is produced. "What counts for the environment is the outcome of the emission balance under consideration of the well-to-wheel approach," he noted.