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- Electric cars cheaper than combustion engines in the passenger car sector from 2025 according to detailed vehicle cost analysis
December 12, 2023
As early as 2025, an average midsize battery-electric vehicle will be cheaper than a comparable combustion engine vehicle. This is the conclusion of a study conducted by scientists at Forschungszentrum Jülich. The researchers developed a model which they used to assess the expected future costs in the transport sector and look at the resulting scenarios for achieving climate protection goals. According to the results, batteries and fuel cells will dominate in the future - "e-fuels" will only play a very minor role in road transport according to the researchers at the Institute of Energy and Climate Research (IEK-3).
From 2035, no new petrol or diesel cars may be registered in the EU. New cars that run on e-fuels are an exception to the ban on combustion engines. This was decided by the EU member states in March of this year. A general ban on combustion engines is therefore no longer an issue and the question arises as to what powertrains will prevail in the passenger car sector in the future.
"Our analyses show that electric mobility will become the cheaper alternative in the vast majority of cases in the next few years and that this trend will continue to grow in the long term. The reasons for this are the positive technical and economic development of electromobility and the simultaneous increase in the cost of fuel for combustion engines," explains Detlef Stolten, head of the Jülich Institute for Techno-Economic Systems Analysis.
According to the calculations of the IEK-3 researchers, advantages in terms of maintenance costs and efficiency will mean that from the middle of this decade onwards, the battery-electric variant will have a lower total cost over its service life. In contrast, the manufacturing costs of electrified powertrains will still be higher than those of a conventional combustion engine car in 2025.
