Dr. Peter Mock:

I can briefly answer the question on plug-in hybrids and leave it up to my colleagues to respond to the other questions. In the example I showed, the BMW vehicle, at least according to the test drive from the magazine I cited, has fuel consumption and CO2 emissions about nine times higher than other vehicles advertised. That may be an extreme example, but we have analysed plug-in hybrid vehicles for markets in Europe and worldwide for several years. Based on data from thousands of vehicles, I can say that the typical plug-in hybrid car, as a company car, consumes about five times more fuel and emits about five times more CO2 than advertised, on average. A plug-in hybrid vehicle used as a private car uses about three times as much. It is not nine times as much, but a figure which is three or five times higher is significantly more than one would expect.

The European Commission has acknowledged this and in the meantime has changed the regulations so that from 2025 onwards the procedure for determining the official fuel consumption and CO2 values of plug-in hybrids will change.

From 2025 onwards, the advertised numbers will become a lot more realistic than they are today. That is still a little bit in the future but we can already see the implications of it today because most manufacturers are moving away from plug-in hybrids. They are not on offer as much as they used to be and people are not buying them so much any more. At least we are moving in the right direction but we still have some extreme cases, as the BMW vehicle that I referred to demonstrates. The real problem for the future is the energy consumption of battery EVs because plug-in hybrid vehicles will disappear from the market in the next couple of years for sure.