The steadily advancing climate change is one of the greatest challenges that exist worldwide. Traffic, especially passenger and freight road traffic with cars and trucks, currently contributes significantly to anthropogenic CO₂ emissions as the main cause of global warming. Accordingly, regulations on CO₂ emissions from cars and trucks are in force or being introduced worldwide. In addition, social pressure is increasing in the direction of a far-reaching social responsibility of the automotive industry to minimize the ecological footprint of its products. These framework conditions are a key driver for technological developments throughout the vehicle.

Challenges for the automotive industry

Several parallel challenges arise from legal and social requirements:

1. The available technology portfolio measures only represent an indirect lever for vehicle manufacturers (OEM). Fleet emissions are generated on the basis of new registrations. End customers thus determine whether the manufacturer's fleet target is achieved through their purchase behavior that can only be controlled to a very limited extent.
2. Factors that cannot be directly influenced by the automotive industry determine the market success of individual technologies, e. g. the targeted promotion of specific drivetrain concepts or the development of fuel and electricity prices.
3. The development of technologies to meet the emission targets, in particular technologies for electrified drive trains, is regarded as the biggest cost driver in the automotive industry alongside the development of automated driving functions. In addition to the large necessary investments in new technologies, vehicle manufacturers are threatened with high penalties for non-compliance with the legislative fleet limits.

These challenges result in a high economic risk due to the unclear market development and simultaneously high investments. For OEM and suppliers, this results in an unclear demand for their products and thus raises the question about which technology decisions should be made.

Our approach

Our solution is to use a specially developed modelling of market dynamics to make valid forecasts of market developments and thus systematically reduce the economic risk.

The findings derived from this are relevant for:

• OEMs to define segment-, brand- and market-specific optimized strategies
• Suppliers, in order to correctly adapt their R&D strategy to technological trends at an early stage
• Associations and politics in order to obtain fact-based decision support.

What we do

• Scenario-based modelling of CO2 target compliance strategies at manufacturer and overall market level in all relevant markets
• Derivation of technology deployment rates at component and system level
• Quantification of the CO2 benefits of specific technologies
• Analysis of the customer perspective: cost / TCO and technology adaptation
• Modeling of alternative legislations, e.g. integration of LCA or credit trading
• Projection of aggregated emissions from road transport
• Strategy consulting for OEMs and suppliers using the entire fka consulting portfolio

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EU CO₂ analysis