 All right. Thank you. Welcome, everyone, to this brown bag on electric vehicles and plug-in vehicles and understanding the uptake of those. My name is Björn Nyckvist and I'm a researcher here in Stockholm Environment Institute that's in Stockholm for those listening in from other places. And with me today I have the presenter which is Frances Spray from Chalmers University. She's a researcher in this field and we actually share the same background from Chalmers where I was an undergrad and you also a while. All right. A PhD then. Yeah, it was a PhD and I was a master student but we have the same type of background in terms of undergrads. And so we knew each other back 10-15 years ago but and now we happen to be both in the area of electric vehicle research. So Frances did a postdoc at Stanford and now back at Chalmers as an associate professor. Assistant professor, sorry. And she will give a talk for about half an hour and I'll basically hand the word to you and yeah, mediate questions and pass the mic along later on. But I think we say questions to the end right for but if I guess there is an opportunity also during from the audience here if you have any pressing questions. All right. Thank you. Okay, so thank you very much for me to be able to present here. So as I said, this is a presentation about understanding potential plug-in hybrid electric vehicle and battery electric vehicle adoption through car movement data and it's I should say that it's a Swedish focus on it kind of. So the ones that are working it's not work just with me. We're a group working on these issues at Chalmers. So besides me it's also Stan Carlson who is associate professor and two PhD students, Niklas Jakobsson and Lars Henrik Bjarnsson. So they are highly contributing to the results that I'll be presenting today. So what we've done is that we've had the part of the work that we're doing that I'll present here is based on so-called car movement data projects that we have. So the idea is that when it comes to plug-in hybrids and battery electric vehicles how you actually use the vehicle is quite important both for limited range and economic viability. And so what we did was to start and especially Stan Carlson started the first work about gathering data of how vehicles are being used today. So car movement data. So the first step was between 2010 and 2012 in which about it was sent out to about over 700 vehicles but we have good data from about 500 vehicles in the west side of Sweden. I'll have a little bit more of a representative sample for that and we have GPS logging of how they moved around for average two months. Moving on we realized that when it comes to battery electric vehicles one important adoption group is households that have two vehicles because then you can address the limited range by having another conventional vehicle in it. So then the idea was in this one here we just logged one vehicle per household. So here was the idea to take both vehicles in the same household and log them. So we had about 100 households and about 60 of them with good data. And then this is an ongoing project that we're working on now in which we have taken these here the two car households some of them and replace one of their conventional vehicles with an EV and then log them while they're using the EV both the EV and the conventional vehicle to be able to see is there a difference in travel pattern between when you have one EV and a conventional vehicle compared to two conventional vehicles but we've also we are also performing interviews with these households both before and after to be able to see how they perceive having any be if this adoption has been any kind of problem and what differences they perceive that it is to have an EV versus a conventional vehicle. So just this is the first one where we have selected a region of Vestajötta, Lansdegunen, for those who are Swedish speaking this area here in Sweden because it is quite representative for Sweden in terms of city size distribution amount of urban and rural areas at least maybe not for up here in the north but yeah at least for where the majority of the Swedish people live. And all cars were selected that are representatives in terms of size fuel and location they're all privately driven so there are no company cars in here should be set out and it's one car in a household so it has if we look at this representation there's slightly more senior citizens that just happen to be there but not significantly more and then we have the vehicles have a higher annual VKT than the average slightly higher but the reason for that is also because we chose to have quite new vehicles so not older than eight years and they normally drive longer distances. VKT is vehicle kilometers travel so annual VKT so how much they travel and normally the average for all of Sweden is taken down because the older their vehicles are the less they are driven so we have up to eight years old vehicles and the reason why we chose that is because we presume that if you have any V the driving pattern is going to be more similar to a relatively new car than a car that is over eight years old that is maybe standing most of the time. So if we look at the different studies I'm going to present a little bit more in depth to of the studies in which we looked at the data briefly a third one and then just go with some preliminary results from the ongoing one. This one here we look at plug-in hybrid electric vehicles we use the first data set and we presume in this one we wanted to see if you presume in a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle that you would have like there would be an optimal battery size for that that you would have for them so in the plug-in hybrid you have a battery you have an electric engine and then you have a conventional engine as well and so we want to see okay but then you the question arise optimal battery size based on what and we started to looking at three different optimizations and one was the total cost of ownership savings for the users if you look at that the other was the maximization of total electric drive fraction so this we thought was kind of the user perspective is you would want to optimize total cost of ownership this we thought was more from a societal perspective so why do you want plug-in hybrid electric vehicles well you want to because you want to increase the amount of driving on electricity and so therefore we thought if you want to maximize this what would be an optimal battery size and then we instead look at well if you want to get as many plug-in hybrid vehicles in the market as possible what would then be the optimal battery size which could be from an OEM like from the car manufacturers perspectives or it could be in a more dynamic view is that you want to have many vehicles out in the beginning and just to get to market stimulate the uptake of it so before I go into our results I just want to point out a little bit what differences so we based our assumption a little bit on total cost of ownership like this trade-off of how much more battery capacity can be if you add another kilometer it can you get the savings replaced by that but when you look at that you see normally a lot of these analysis are based on battery price but battery prices will be very affect very differently depending on how energy prices are so this is actually just to show these actually individually optimized batteries it should say in this one because it's another paper in which we looked at that so not presuming that there's just one battery on the market but each individual driver has the battery size that is optimal for him or her and so these are averages and so you get if you look at you optimize there and you have different battery prices you see that you get a different share of PHEBs depending on if you're in Sweden Germany in the US so this is how even with the same battery price the influence of energy prices will have on the total cost of ownership what is the economic viability of the plug-in hybrid and so because of that well one reason for that we actually looked instead of marginal electricity distance instead so as I said at how much putting together some of these parameters that marginal and electricity driven per kilometer range and per year so what is the average distance for which one more kilometer of range is equivalent to the savings that you get for that because when you drive on electricity it costs less than driving on fuel and so this is just to show a little bit how it relates to battery prices because people are normally more common looking at battery prices as a economic viability and we see here again the difference between Sweden Germany and the US but in it what what I want to illustrate with this is in the current in the future graphs you'll have this parameter down here and so you'll see as this one gets lower it becomes better economic conditions for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and so depending on which country is you can you can see what battery price it corresponds to so if you have this MED of 600 if you're in Germany well that's about the battery price maybe have about 700 but if you're in Sweden it's not even you would actually you are already down at around 500 you're already today you would have an MED that is much lower so that is just to relate it to you so you can understand the next graph which is actually our results so here are the results from that and which as you see so over here it's better better economic conditions for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and if we see here this is the optimal battery size then so again presuming that there is actually one battery size just one battery size for plug-in hybrids on the home market and these are the different optimizations that I talked about so this is total cost of ownership for the users the black one here is electric drive fraction and this is the number of plug-in hybrids on the roads so what you see is if you want to optimize for the number of plug-in hybrids on the roads then small battery sizes are actually a bit more optimal well if you said want to optimize for electric drive fraction how long my share of the total kilometers driven you should actually go for larger battery sizes and then we see the effect if you look at well of course then if you look at the share of vehicles plug-in high if you optimize for plug-in hybrids they'll be more of them but the interesting thing I think here is this the potential electric drive fraction in which if you optimize for these then having many PHEVs on the road you get a lower share of electric drive fraction so there can be a trade-off between those two that having many plug-in hybrids on the road with small batteries can give us a smaller share of electric drive fractions should say one thing about this and that is what we've done one assumption here in these results that we've then looked that again to so we have presumed here that there's a small cost in going from what is today a hybrid a conventional hybrid which which cannot be plugged in to going to a plug-in hybrid and so basically we presume the case of which the Toyota Prius which has a hybrid model today and then goes in a plug-in hybrid and basically just adds a bigger a bigger battery to it and doesn't have to do any extra cost come connected with the driveline or increasing capacity so much of the electric engine we have another scenario in which we look at presumed that this cost is much higher and we we take it as an example the Chevy Volt which there is no equivalent hybrid along the way and which has a much larger battery and has much more capacity and the driveline is probably much more investment costs in it and if you add that investment cost then you actually have to have much lower MED costs a much better economic conditions for plug-in hybrids to to come true and then the differences between these scenarios are not so different that's because if you see if you if you shift this curve in this direction you would end up around in this area much more instead so this is presuming that the extra costs are going from a hybrid to a plug-in hybrid is not that much more than the battery cost so since I know there's not much time I'll move on and then I guess there'll be questions later and so that was plug-in hybrid electric vehicles then we wanted to look instead at battery electric vehicles and in this case here we we wanted to look at this this idea about multi car households and specifically then two car households and we wanted to see is there any difference between first and second car and in this case we define the first car as the car that's actually driven most in the household and the second car as the one that's driven less and so the idea is that first of all the second car we might our assumption was that the second car would be more suitable because it's it maybe doesn't drive as long distances so range is not as much of a problem and but then the question that the second question arose but if that's the case then maybe it may not be economical to actually shift the second car in this case we collaborate with Fraunhofer EC and besides our data they had a large German mobility panel in which they instead of having GPS measurements they had household survey of individuals movements and vehicles and this is just a little summary the first one here is from our data in which we see observation period is the mean is 58 days and the maximum 147 well they have all seven days so they only have one week of observations but just they don't have any slides with all our with equations and so on what they do then since 7th day is such a limited they fit those seven days to log normal distribution and use the log normal distribution to be able to update the vehicle kilometers travel to be able to do that analysis well we in our Swedish state actually extrapolate to one year from the measurements that we have so what we see here this is the Swedish data only here is the range of when we presume a certain range and we look at how many driving days are actually fulfilled so here we are presuming that you could only charge your electric vehicle at night nowhere no nowhere else during the day and so there what we see is as this blue line here is the share of cars in that we have looked that don't that have all driving days fulfilled so basically if there's a range of let's say 300 kilometers you go up there you're slightly close to 70% of all the cars it fits all their driving that they need to do these other lines here is if you accept that there are some days that needs some kind of adaptation so an average one day per month requiring some kind of adaptation in which you actually drive longer than the range is this light blue line and then you come up to one to two days per month and this is when you start getting per week and more than one per week and so these should actually at this line here some up to a hundred once you get or not really but almost when you come up to 400 kilometers there's some few some few people that have individual days ranging over 400 kilometers so that gives some kind of indication all vehicles in general if we look at this distinction between first car and second car in the two data sets we what we wanted to do we met this in days requiring adaptation so how many days do you need to have an alternative and this is a cumulative share of the vehicles so we see this is all cars here and we see this line up here is the second car so we see that there's a much larger CDF for the second car so there are many more second cars that have fewer days requiring adaptation compared to the first car which is down here which is an indication that when it comes to driving patterns the driving patterns of the second car are much better adopted to the limited range of the electric vehicle it said we have 120 kilometers range which is kind of based on the actual driving today of like actual range today of like a Nissan Leaf or Golf even if some of the stated ranges are longer and here's for the German data the German data is much smoother and that's because they base their calculations on a distribution in an hours on extrapolated data but the pattern is exactly the same that when it comes to second cars a much larger share of them have need fewer days requiring adaptation so then as I said our next question was then okay it might but it might be that they so they drive shorter distances and they drive less then maybe it's not economically viable to to have it as a second car so we went in and we looked at we made some conservative economic assumptions as discussed this with Bjorn who did battery prices we actually used much more conservative battery prices but just to give an indication and there we see that I mean the share of vehicles that are economically viable is the cars that they shift down dramatically but we see that the same pattern exists there that the second cars are the ones that are anyway best and the reason for that one reason for that should be said is that what we do is for the days that are not fulfilled we put an extra cost so we presume that if you want to anyway do that trip you get an extra cost of like renting a vehicle so we put up for each day requiring adaptation it is an extra cost in our total cost of ownership calculations and that means that since the first cars have more days that require adaptation the cost goes up for having an electric vehicle even if they might drive more on electricity and that goes through that the second car will be better economically so what in in this case here we have looked at the first and the second car as two independent two independent vehicles so we have not seen that we've presumed that what you drive with your second car you'll continue driving that and we drive with your first you continue driving that so no shifting in between the cars and so what we're in our in our second car measurement by measuring both vehicles we could actually see that because if you're going to shift trips you have to know be able to do that that the vehicles are back at the same house you have to know that it's possible to even to be able to do this so that's why we again looked at the facility and we looked at those who had two cars we wanted to have people that were commuting because that we saw was a potential group for for better electric vehicles and as these were the specifications of the cars so we wouldn't end up with big SUVs in which we thought we're not viable to replace anyways from electric vehicle and so we and we wanted both both right two people in the household who are actively driving so you have this kind of trade-off between the two so this is still on our analysis it's mainly Stan Carlson who is working with with this project but I just wanted to do it so these are the results here are this is if you replace the second car how many fleet average annual how much you would drive on electricity here's if you replace the first car and here is if you optimize between the two vehicles so you shift and the one so that you try to replace the vehicle that is best suited for an EV on that trip and so as we see there's a huge potential of actually increasing the number of electric miles if you optimize here and they're also making it more profitable for it but also having a better environmental impact and it should be said why the second car here is lower is compared to an in our previous result is because here we have kilometers traveled so they do travel shorter distances and that's why they replace fewer miles if you shift them towards I don't have no idea about time five more minutes yeah no okay but five is perfect and and so what the last five minutes when I do as I said so this slide here you actually look this is a potential that you can come up to but you don't actually know if people are prepared to shift between cars if in some households it might be that oh but this is my car and this is my wife or my husband's car I would never sit in it or you know I always have my stuff in the car I don't want to shift between them and so we actually wanted to to test to see how do households cope with this fact of electric vehicles how did they do it and I say why we are now working with replacing so we had one group ten be a ten households or in during the summer and we have ten more households now until January February and so we've carried out the first round of interviews and just these are very tentative results nothing that I would want to be quoted about because we haven't really done the analysis but from what we can see is that there is actually no major problem for adaptation they don't find it as problematic we've tried to ask is there any trip you've had to anytime you both go in a different direction and you know we've tried to see if there could be anything and they many answered no there's no problem with the range really because we have another car so we take that a car when we want to go on on long distance trips or one issue that's come up actually which is interesting is that towing is an important fact to have like this cat to be able to the capacity to tow which is also one of the reasons why for example when they've chosen which car to replace and things like that but mainly they don't perceive it as problematic some say yes maybe we've had to plan our trips a little bit more but it's not been a major issue but many so many are quite positive to electric vehicle they like it they don't feel that it's a major difference that they feel that it fits in quite well they are a bit unhappy about the range but that is because the range is not really like the stated range it goes down quite quickly so they they would want to have a little bit more but it's not been problematic for them anyway but when it comes to the question if they are willing to buy a electric vehicle many of them I say are very risk averse with that they are not willing to do the investment of actually buying an electric vehicle but are willing to lease and we know for sure that at least one of the families has actually gone in and lease an electric vehicle afterwards but if you ask them would you be willing to buy one they say no because they and the main reason for that is the high price and the risk of the battery that it will not have a long lifetime enough and they don't know what they can get on the second-hand market for the vehicle there's also a tendency what I call the clean conscience rebounds so it's not so much an economic rebound that the electric vehicle is cheaper to drive but they actually say that they use the EV a little bit more because you know you know it's an electric vehicle it doesn't it doesn't feel bad to drive it so so one couple had kids with driver's licenses that we're still living at home they're like yeah we would probably let our kids drive the electric vehicle more than the conventional vehicle because then it's an electric vehicle and feels okay so we otherwise maybe we would have said them take the bus but now I was okay that they took the electric vehicle some others that were in the countryside and they let their kids drive back to Gothenburg much more than that they would otherwise do because it's an electric vehicle so it doesn't pollute so you you can see that we haven't be able to quantify it to see anything on it but it's just from the interviews so there I think we're my extra my five minutes there this is just to say the other publication other studies that we are working using the same data sets around it looking at again battery sizes this is much more on the distribution of daily vehicle driving distances more theoretical paper and this is looking at the break energy regeneration so thank you so I'll just start with a question or two to get this going and then if you have more questions feel free to raise your hand so first thing I thought about was your total cost of ownership calculations what you include and perhaps don't include because there's a lot of things you could sort of account for lower service costs that insert that's quite uncertain and so I say if you want to comment a bit more on that and also in combination with that what you can say of the sort of current subsidies for electric vehicles and how they fare against this the cost level as you have looked at it so when it comes to total cost of ownership we have not taken into consideration maintenance and services at all so we have presumed that that's equal so it's investment costs and then it's running costs that we have taken into consideration into it and in the in the one for Swedish and German data we have for the Swedish case included the current subsidy for battery the supermiglia between me and Swedish so that's one of the reasons oh no I have too many things in my hands but and so what you see here is if you look at the shares here for Germany they are very very low compared to Sweden where you any can gay get around 12% and so on but here it's it's like one 2% so it's much lower for Germany and and when we've tried to look now I don't have my computer so I don't have the extra slide but when we try to look that at what is the effect of the subsidy versus electric the different energy prices we see that the effect is about the same so the fact that there are better condition economic conditions in Sweden is a combination and and it's about the same effect both the fact that you have a subsidy and when you start and the fact that the energy prices are different in Sweden so is that answers anyone who wants to yeah can you just clarify a little bit about what you mean when you say energy prices because there's lots of types of energy there's like oil biofuel and then electricity and it depends on each country so when it comes to energy prices we mainly looked at two and that's the average electricity price which the consumer actually pays for like private households average electricity prices for the household and then we've taken gasoline and diesel prices so I didn't go into it here but when we compare when we look at the vehicle if it's going to be a battery electric vehicle then we also have or if it's going to be a gasoline or a diesel vehicle so we have gasoline prices and in diesel prices I have a question on the methodology for the interviews what was said to the household that were interviewed because consumer behavior normally we don't like to change like it's really difficult to change habits so to what extent they were conscious of the potential benefits of trying out to optimize their use or was it really like here you have two cars this one is electrical this one is not try to make the most of it and they decide what's the most according to their understanding yeah so we actually also got questions from those that we were both interviewing and giving the vehicles in which they asked do you want us to drive a certain way or anything like that so we were quite open with that we said no we want you to drive it as if you would actually have bought the electric vehicle yourself whereas if it was so we wanted what we told them is that we want them to have as much normal driving as possible so kind of them putting into the mindset that they've decided to buy an electric vehicle and that how would they use it so they have not gotten any indications that what we're looking at is how they can optimize it or anything like that we've said just that we're curious to see how it fits in their daily life anyone else otherwise I'll chip in one and that is okay anyone from the from internet okay okay so from Sean Hobbs here at what point do you think consumers will become more confident in terms of battery life and resell values how quickly or slowly do you think this might happen oh a very good question but also very hard one to answer so I think when they I think when they might start getting confident is when you after a few years when you start having some consumer experience from it so to really create confidence you probably would need another five to ten years because then you start having electric vehicles more electric vehicles that I've actually been out for a long time and so consumers can actually see that hopefully if they actually have a longer lifespan that that it works with hybrid electric vehicles that's what happened with the Priuses there was a lot of worry in the beginning that they also would not have a longer battery lifespan and now you actually see that they are running they're still running you have quite a lot of old Priuses still running on the roads today so I think that's what is needed for it what might help and facilitate that is to have better good battery guarantees and that's also something that you have experiences from the hybrids like in California in which California State went in and prolonged boat when it comes to distances kilometers travel in years for the battery lifespan and I think that might like make that quicker for the consumer so I have one that might maybe to was summing this up but more questions are welcome we have a couple more minutes and that is if you take so the full picture here from your types of studies and your impressions of battery like vehicles and plug-ins what what is the most important barrier to people overall for for considering buying plug-ins or up your battery like vehicles directly from the research when it comes to at least second car households or like two car households it's actually the price because that comes up most often is that the price they still are presumed to be too expensive and I think that might be at an initial state even more than what ranges because when when the consumers when they get to try it they realize that range is not such a big limit as as it is at least if you have another vehicle that you can shift to so I would if I would single out one it would probably be price could you also qualitatively it's a relative related to that question could you also qualitatively compare the impact of like the oil market how right now oil prices are extremely low how that affects how people want to consume electric vehicles so it's actually interesting with the law with decreasing oil prices and gas prices if we look at the market today we actually don't see that much of a dent and I mean the electric vehicles continue to increase and so some say that might might there might be other factors behind since people are not always so rational I mean we use total cost of ownership in our analysis but they're not that many that I think maybe always do it otherwise an indication of that can just be if I can just find going through here is actually this one here when it comes to plug-in hybrids in which you can say the US compared to Germany and Sweden one of the big differences there and so when it comes to the economic profitability of these electric vehicles I mean the case of the US is much worse but then on the other hand US is one of the markets that has actually that is selling electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids so you see that there are other factors that are just as important that are coming in I could comment a bit on that as well that I think that there is some at least some indication of not as rapidly going sales number in the US no due to the all price lower all places and then gasoline prices but here in Europe we have a large much larger proportion of tax etc that keeps the price up at high levels even though the raw oil price goes down so it's a very different picture between different countries and regions so any final questions from from abroad or online or in the room otherwise I think we'll round off so thank you everyone and thanks again Francis for presenting and great happy year okay