Dr. Peter Mock:

On the structure of the systems, in the French system, someone does not pay for the weight of the vehicle at all until it reaches 1.8 tonnes. That will soon be 1.6 tonnes and only then will every additional kilogramme costs €10, as we mentioned earlier. The Norwegian system is different. There the first 500 kg weight are free and then one pays for every kilogramme of weight and the heavier the car becomes, the more someone pays for the weight. It is a progressive system where not every kilogramme costs the same but where the first 500 kg are free, then the next ones cost a certain amount and then the next even more. Those are two different systems.

On range and battery technology, there are constant developments in batteries. The sodium ion battery is on the horizon and there is hope that battery technology will be cheaper and less problematic from the management perspective than the current lithium ion batteries and much cheaper. However, at the moment, more electric range costs money meaning the cars with a higher range tend to be more expensive. There are already cars on the market that can easily have a range of 800 km in real life. Someone driving 1,000 km per week is what we would call a long-distance driver. We have worked on a study, which we will publish in the coming weeks, which looks at different consumer types - urban commuter, rural commuter and long-distance driver - and at the different electric range a bigger battery does for those types of consumers. We find that for most consumers, for the urban and rural commuters, a larger battery size is not needed. That battery size is hardly ever used, makes the vehicle more expensive, heavier and creates a lot more emissions in battery production and it really does not help the commuter because they cannot make use of the battery at all. Long distance drivers account for a relatively small portion of the population who need these longer ranges. For those drivers, it makes sense. It is a necessity to convince those people to drive electric cars but it is very important that we provide consumers different choices so they can really select the EV that they need and that we also provide an incentive for consumers not to choose a large-battery EV with a long range if they do not make use of it. It is just a waste of resources and it is a problem for society.