Impact of the Light-Duty Vehicles’ Storage and Travel Demand on the Sustainable Exploitation of Available Resources and Air Pollution Abatement

Abstract

Light-duty vehicles are the predominant means of road transport. As the world population is expected to increase significantly in the following decades, so too will the car fleet. Due to the rising population, and the implicitly higher travel demand, the energy demand of cars will increase too, and this will put a strain on current resources, with negative effects on the supply chain, possibly leading to more pollution. Many of the current sustainable transport models and frameworks attempt to predict the vehicle market share for different powertrains and the resulting impact based on scenarios that cater to the automotive market and industry demands. At the same time, most neglect aspects regarding resources’ depletion and storage demand. In this sense, this study proposes a coherent testing methodology based on the ratio between demand and supply in order to address the limitations of these studies, mainly related to the sustainable exploitation of available resources, which are analyzed herein in correlation with the current predictions. A sensitivity analysis is provided in order to evaluate the uncertainty of utilized predictions. As a result of this analysis, two novel scenarios for assessing the evolution of the vehicle market share are proposed by the authors. When compared to similar scenarios, it was shown that the proposed scenarios lead to noticeable benefits in reducing dependency on the resources associated with a demand of energy and raw materials and in mitigating air pollution, including related costs.