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Background: On the way to a more sustainable society, transport needs to be urgently optimized regarding energy consumption and pollution control. While in earlier decades, Europe followed automobile technology leaps initiated in the USA, it has decoupled itself for 20 years by focusing research capacity towards the diesel powertrain. The resulting technology shift has led to some 45 million extra diesel cars in Europe. Its outcome in terms of health and environmental effects will be investigated below.
Results: Expected greenhouse gas savings initiated by the shift to diesel cars have been overestimated. Only about one tenth of overall energy efficiency improvements of passenger cars can be attributed to it. These minor savings are on the other hand overcompensated by a significant increase of supply chain CO2 emissions and extensive black carbon emissions of diesel cars without particulate filter. We conclude that the European diesel car boom did not cool down the atmosphere. Moreover, toxic NO x emissions of diesel cars have been underestimated up to 20-fold in officially announced data. The voluntary agreement signed in 1998 between the European Automobile industry and the European Commission envisaging to reduce CO2 emissions has been identified as elementary for the ensuing European diesel car boom. Four factors have been quantified in order to explain very different dieselization rates across Europe: impact of national car/supplier industry, ecological modernization, fuel tourism and corporatist political governance. By comparing the European diesel strategy to the Japanese petrol-hybrid avenue, it becomes clear that a different road would have both more effectively reduced CO2 emissions and pollutants.
Conclusion: Europe's car fleets have been persistently transformed from being petrol-driven to diesel-driven over the last 20 years. This paper investigates on how this came to be and why Europe took a distinct route as compared to other parts of the world. It also attempts to evaluate the outcome of stated goals of this transformation which was primarily a robust reduction in GHG emissions. We conclude that global warming has been negatively affected, and air pollution has become alarming in many European locations. More progressive development scenarios could have prevented these outcomes.
A comprehensive overview is provided evaluating direct real-world CO2 emissions of both diesel and petrol cars newly registered in Europe between 1995 and 2015. Before 2011, European diesel cars emitted less CO2 per kilometre than petrol cars, but since then there is no appreciable difference in per-km CO2 emissions between diesel and petrol cars. Real-world CO2 emissions of diesel cars have not declined appreciably since 2001, while the CO2 emissions of petrol cars have been stagnant since 2012. When adding black carbon related CO2-equivalents, such as from diesel cars without particulate filters, diesel cars were discovered to have had much higher climate relevant emissions until the year 2001 when compared to petrol cars. From 2001 to 2015 CO2-equivalent emissions from new diesel cars and petrol cars were hardly distinguishable. Lifetime use phase CO2-equivalent emissions of all European passenger vehicles were modelled for 1995–2015 based on three scenarios: the historic case, another scenario freezing percentages of diesel cars at the low levels from the early 1990s (thus avoiding the observed “boom” in new diesel registrations), and an advanced mitigation scenario based on high proportions of petrol hybrid cars and cars burning gaseous fuels. The difference in CO2-equivalent emissions between the historical case and the scenario avoiding the diesel car boom is only 0.4%. The advanced mitigation scenario would have been able to achieve a 3.4% reduction in total CO2-equivalent emissions over the same time frame. The European diesel car boom appears to have been ineffective at reducing climate-warming emissions from the European transport sector.