Vehicle ownership to 2015: implications for energy use and emissions

This paper forecasts the growth in car ownership to the year 2015 for Organization for Economic Go-operation and Development (OECD) countries and a number of Asian economies, and estimates the implications of this growth on energy demand and emissions, The vehicle forecasts are based on models derived from distribution functions, which relate the car stock to income and population, The models are dynamically specified, so that short-and long-run income elasticities are estimated for the individual countries, The question of vehicle saturation, both in terms of ownership levels and time, is analysed, as are the similarities and differences in the demand relationships among the various countries, The forecasts of car ownership are combined with income and population projections and assumptions on possible trends in vehicle use, fuel efficiency and fuel prices to produce a range of estimates of fuel consumption CO(2) emissions, The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the results for energy, environmental and transport policy. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.