Paving the way to electrified road transport - Publicly funded research, development and demonstration projects on electric and plug-invehicles in Europe

摘要

The electrification of road transport or electro-mobility is seen by many as a potential game-changing technology that could have a significant influence on the future cost and environmental performance of personal individual mobility as well as short distance goods transport. While there is currently a great momentum vis-à-vis electro-mobility, it is yet unclear, if its deployment is economically viable in the medium to long term. Electromobility, in its early phase of deployment, still faces significant hurdles that need to be overcome in order to reach a greater market presence. Further progress is needed to overcome some of these hurdles. The importance of regulatory and financial support to emerging environmentally friendly transport technologies has been stressed in multiple occasions. The aim of our study was to collect the information on all on-going or recently concluded research, development and demonstration projects on electric andplug-in hybrid electric vehicles, which received EU or national public funding with a budget >1mln Euro, in order to assess which of the electric drive vehicles (EDV) challenges are addressed by these projects and to identify potential gaps in the research, development, and demonstration (R, D & D) landscape in Europe. The data on R, D & D projects on electric and plug-in vehicles, which receive public funding, has been collected by means of (i) on-line research, (ii) validation of an inventory of projects at member state level through national contacts and (iii) validation of specific project information through distribution of project information templates among project coordinators. The type of information which was gathered for the database included: EDV component(s) targeted for R&D, location and scope of demo projects, short project descriptions, project budget and amount of public co-funding received, funding organisation, project coordinator,number and type of partners (i.e. utilities, OEMs, services, research institutions, local authorities), start and duration of the project. The validation process permitted the identification of additional projects which were not accounted for in the original online search. Statistical elaboration of the collected data was conducted. More than 320 R, D & D projects funded by the EU and Member states arelisted and analyzed. Their total budgets add up to approximately 1.9 billion Euros. Collected data allowed also the development of an interactive emobility visualization tool, called EV-Radar, which portrays in an interactive way R&D and demonstration efforts for EDVs in Europe. It can be accessed under http://iet.jrc.ec.europa.eu/ev-radar.