Impacts of Economic, Technological and Operational Factors on the Economic Competitiveness of Electric Commercial Vehicles in Fleet Replacement Decisions

摘要

Electric commercial vehicles (ECV) have the potential to substantially reduce greenhouse gasemissions, noise, and pollution in urban areas. In addition, ECVs have lower per-mile operatingcosts and potentially lower maintenance costs. However, the initial purchase cost of ECVs issignificantly higher than the purchase cost of a conventional diesel vehicle. From a purelyeconomic perspective, there is a cost tradeoff between the low operating and maintenance costsof ECVs and their high initial capital costs. In this paper, a fleet replacement optimizationframework is employed to analyze the competitiveness of ECVs. Scenarios with different fleetutilization, fuel efficiency and sensitivity analysis of ten additional factors indicate that ECVs aremore cost effective when conventional diesel vehicles’ fuel efficiency is low (8.2 miles/gallon)and daily utilization is more than 54 miles. Breakeven values of some key economic andtechnological factors that separate the competitiveness between ECVs and conventional dieselvehicles are calculated in all scenarios. For example, in low conventional diesel vehicle fuelefficiency and low daily utilization scenario, ECVs are more competitive when their purchaseprices are less than $135,586.