Modelling car fleet renewal in Finland: A model and development speed-based scenarios

Abstract The development of car fleet plays major part when considering the emissions resulted from passenger car use. Globally, there are many different methods and models for car fleet development estimation, but majority of these represent the results only on national level. In Finland, existing models do not note differences between area types. In this paper, we introduce car fleet model (SALAMA), which can be used to estimate car fleet development for both national and regional levels in Finland. Model allows to alter different variables (such as car fleet development speed, car ownership level and probability to change driving power) to examine, how different policy changes would affect the car fleet development. The paper depicts the Finnish baseline scenario compared to the effects of faster (30% faster than baseline) and slower (30% slower than baseline) fleet development speed scenarios. On the baseline scenario, model estimates 320 000 electric cars (both BEV and PHEV) in 2030 and 830 000 in 2040. For faster scenarios, model estimates 100 000 and 250 000 electric cars more in respective years, while slower scenario produces 80 000 and 180 000 electric cars less compared to baseline scenario. In addition, the model shows that there are clear differences between area types. For example, the share of electric car increases faster in urban areas than in rural areas.