Mr. Apostolos Petropoulos:

I thank the committee for the invitation. As Professor Daly and Dr. Mock mentioned, we are talking about a structural shift towards the larger and less fuel-efficient vehicles known as SUVs. To give an overview of what is happening globally, last year, approximately one in two new car registrations were SUVs. We have seen exponential sales growth take place, mainly in the US, India and Europe. However, the most important impact of this is on the environment. If we compare an SUV versus an average medium-sized car, at a global level, it consumes approximately 20% more energy. In Europe, due to the particularity of its market where there is much more crossover with smaller SUVs, this number is approximately 10%. Globally, there are 330 million SUVs, which emit nearly 1 billion tonnes of CO2. If that is treated as a single category, we rank that as the world's sixth largest emitter of CO2 in 2022.

Of course, most policies focus on electrification and how we reach fuel-efficiency targets, but the IEA would like to shed light on how the size of the vehicle really matters and how downsizing policies will help meet all the different climate pledges. Even if some positive aspects are already happening, for example, we see quite a few models are electric SUVs, by far the majority of SUVs currently on the roads rely on fossil fuels. We are talking about 98% globally. On the one side, as the previous speakers mentioned, SUVs need additional energy and have higher weight, so this issue is linked to that.

However, even if we see electrification as a silver bullet, having an electrified SUV brings different problems. For example, if we consider battery size, an average SUV has a 70 kilowatt hour battery versus a normal car which has a 50 kilowatt hour battery. This will put additional stresses and risks on the supply chains of critical minerals. To add to what Dr. Mock presented, we are already seeing governments put in place different policies in order to discourage the shift towards SUVs. We have some positive examples arising from the bonus malussystem in France. In Germany, they have started a discussion on having taxes on large and high emission vehicles like SUVs. Thank you for the time and I am happy to take questions.