Capturing the Usage of the German Car Fleet for a One Year Period to Evaluate the Suitability of Battery Electric Vehicles – A Model based Approach

The low driving range of battery electric vehicles (BEV) is often considered as relevant reason for the low BEV sales. In order to verify this assumption, the usage of conventional cars in Germany needs to be analyzed. These analyses may help to make more reliable and realistic statements to what extent German cars could be replaced by BEVs without restrictions for their users. Most travel surveys do only consider a single day or a short period of time in the analysis. Longer time periods should be taken into consideration when analyzing the travel data since the daily car usage is not identical every day. Since there are no representative and detailed car usage surveys over longer periods available a hybrid car usage model was developed to close that gap. This model is mainly based on three mobility surveys: the German Mobility Panel (MOP), the car mileage and fuel consumption survey, and the long distance travel survey INVERMO. We show that 13% of the modeled German private car fleet never exceeds 100 km per day during a full year and could be replaced by BEVs without any usage restrictions for their car owners. Another 16% of the modeled private car fleet is driven more than 100 km on 1-4 days during a full year and can be substituted with slight adjustments. These cars are often second cars of a household and used less intensively (6,600 km/year resp. 7600 km/year) than cars not suited for BEV substitution (14,800 km/year). Households that could replace their cars tend to have a lower disposable income. The crux of the matter, however, is that substitution of conventional cars is often not feasible since the mobility budget of BEV suited households tends to be too low or does not make economic sense due to the low annual mileage.