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Facing global climate change and the oncoming shortage of fossil resources, it is necessary to reduce fossil energy consumption. There is a strong need for action concerning road traffic as a main originator of greenhouse gas emissions by use of fossil energy. For a strong mitigation effect, the technological improvement of today’s petrol and diesel engines has to be accompanied by the promotion of alternative vehicles, still being sparsely represented in most car fleets. The spread of one or more new drive-train technologies throughout the transportation sector represents an innovation diffusion process, which is needed in order to achieve long-term climate and energy policy goals. By applying our recently developed model for the market penetration of competing alternative drive-train technologies, this work contributes to the understanding of main processes influencing the diffusion rate.

Electric vehicles today clearly represent the only solution fulfilling the zero emission vehicles (ZEV) standard. However, they are still not an equivalent alternative to gasoline driven cars due to the well known problems of today's batteries. The concept of a parallel hybrid drive line can be an optimal combination of both principles of propulsion in that the gasoline engine guarantees a wide range operation, while electric propulsion can be used within the restricted zero emission zones [20]. The parallel hybrid drive train described here has been realized at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich, Switzerland. For the first time a drive line consisting of a spark ignition engine, an electric asynchronous machine, a flywheel, and a wide range continuously variable transmission (CVT) is realized. An overall control system has been developed for the drive train. This drive line has been integrated in a multi purpose van for real road testing.