Currently, the electrification of passenger cars is seen as one of the key strategies for heading toward a sustainable transport system. Of special interest are battery electric vehicles (BEVs), which can enable significant emission reductions if electricity used is produced from renewable energy sources. However, mainly due to their high investment costs (retail purchase price) of BEVs, they are currently not economically competitive with conventional fossil‐fueled vehicles without different supporting policy measures. This paper analyzes current costs and future prospects for BEVs compared to conventional petrol cars looking at the total costs of ownership. Furthermore, the future prospects are investigated considering technological learning for BEVs, CO₂ taxes for fuels, and various other policy framework conditions such as rebates for the purchase of the BEVs. The major conclusions are as follows: (i) to improve the economics of BEVs, a very important aspect is the introduction of CO₂‐based fuel taxes; (ii) regarding economics, the second important aspect is the reduction of the investment costs of the BEVs due to technological learning, especially of the battery; (iii) in addition, the introduction of CO₂‐based registration taxes for the purchase of passenger cars makes sense; (iv) subsidies or rebates for the purchase of a BEV maybe a measure successful in the short term and helpful to stimulate technological learning; (v) by far, the highest uncertainty regarding the future prospects of BEVs is how fast technological learning will take place, especially for the battery, and how the future development of batteries will be. © 2020 The Authors. Greenhouse Gases: Science and Technology published by Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Environmental problems such as air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are especially challenging in urban areas. Electric mobility in different forms may be a solution. While in recent years a major focus was put on private electric vehicles, e-mobility in public transport is already a very well-established and mature technology with a long history. The core objective of this paper is to analyze the economics of e-mobility in the Austrian capital of Vienna and the corresponding impact on the environment. In this paper, the historical developments, policy framework and scenarios for the future development of mobility in Vienna up to 2030 are presented. A major result shows that in an ambitious scenario for the deployment of battery electric vehicles, the total energy demand in road transport can be reduced by about 60% in 2030 compared to 2018. The major conclusion is that the policies, especially subsidies and emission-free zones will have the largest impact on the future development of private and public e-mobility in Vienna. Regarding the environmental performance, the most important is to ensure that a very high share of electricity used for electric mobility is generated from renewable energy sources.

Electric vehicles represent a necessary alternative for wheeled transportation to meet the global and national targets specified in the Paris Agreement of 2016. However, the high concentration of electric vehicles exposes their harmful effects on the power grid. This reflects negatively on electricity market prices, making the charging of electric vehicles less cost-effective. This study investigates the economic potential of different charging strategies for an existing office site in Austria with multiple charging infrastructures. For this purpose, a proper mathematical representation of the investigated case study is needed in order to define multiple optimization problems that are able to determine the financial potential of different charging strategies. This paper presents a method to implement electric vehicles and stationary battery storage in optimization problems with the exclusive use of linear relationships and applies it to a real-life use case with measured data to prove its effectiveness. Multiple aspects of four charging strategies are investigated, and sensitivity analyses are performed. The results show that the management of the electric vehicles charging processes leads to overall costs reduction of more than 30% and an increase in specific power-related grid prices makes the charging processes management more convenient.