Automobile Technological Transition Scenarios Based on Environmental Drivers

Abstract

Different industrial sectors are assuming measures to mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions, facing the imminent materialization of climate change effects. In the transport sector, one of the measures involves the change in energy source of vehicles, leading to a transition from vehicles powered by fossil fuels (conventional) to electric. Nevertheless, electric vehicles have different drivers that promote their purchases. This work only considers the informed buyers’ interest in making their decisions using environmental criteria. However, these technologies have a series of impacts, including the generation of hazardous waste such as used batteries, which leads consumers to question the environmental impacts generated by conventional and electric vehicles; consequently, it is uncertain which prospective scenarios will dominate in various nations and what will promote them. Therefore, the proposed model is studied as a dynamical system, with bifurcations of codimension 2, which means that it is possible to represent all possible prospective scenarios of this configuration through a bifurcation diagram. In this way, the analysis allows us to find that four families of technological transitions (trajectories that qualitatively can be identified as being of the same behavior class) emerge from the relationships established in the system, showing similarities to the different transition situations recognized on the planet. This model is an attractive tool to classify automobiles’ technological transitions, despite having no other criteria. In fact, although decarbonization is an urgent quest in the transport sector, there are still too many challenges to guarantee environmentally friendly technologies.