CO2 fleet regulation and the future market diffusion of zero-emission trucks in Europe

Highlights: • We analyze the impact of truck CO2 regulation on zero emission truck sales. • We use disaggregated sales data for regulated truck size classes in Europe. • We summarize CO2 reduction cost potential estimates for trucks. • Three scenarios capture the uncertainty of OEM strategies. • We obtain 4–22% zero emission trucks in sales and 2–11% in stock in 2030. Fuel economy regulation is a powerful instrument to reduce CO₂ emissions of vehicles and has recently been extended to heavy-duty vehicles. In Europe, truck manufacturers are required to reduce the CO₂ emissions of newly sold vehicles by 30% until 2030 compared to 2019/2020. Accordingly, several manufacturers have announced the introduction of zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) such as battery electric or fuel cell trucks. However, the sales shares of zero emission trucks to meet the targets have not been analyzed in the literature yet. Here, we derive sales share scenarios for zero emission trucks in Europe based on emissions reduction options and their associated costs. We find that manufacturers will require at least 4–22% of their newly sold heavy-duty vehicles to be zero emission in 2030, depending on their strategy to improve their diesel trucks. This implies a stock share of 2–11% for ZEV trucks in Europe in 2030. Yet, high sales shares for ZEVs and the super credits granted by the regulation allow manufacturers to meet their target with little CO₂ reduction in the conventional fleet leading to low actual emission reduction.