Electric vehicles are on the rise. It is for this exact reason that pertinent questions keep popping up about the batteries of electric vehicles. On behalf of the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, and together with the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, INFRAS has prepared a background document to answer these questions. It has a modular structure and addresses the life cycle of a battery, from raw material extraction to disposal. 

With an increasing number of electric vehicles on the road, mineral oil tax is generating less income. The Federal Council wants to offset this by introducing a compensation levy on electric vehicles. The Swiss Confederation tasked INFRAS, alongside Ecoplan and TCS, to put together a tariff model for this levy.

Corporate objective: become climate neutral. To achieve this, companies also have to start looking at their vehicle fleet. And when it comes to heavy duty vehicles in particular, this raises some questions: What drive system is the future? How is the total cost of drive technologies changing? INFRAS created an analysis with a roadmap until 2040 for a large logistics company. 

Few journeys, but plenty of kilometres: nearly half of Germany’s transport is used for long-distance travel. As a result, this behaviour is difficult to change for the benefit of the environment, as highlighted by a study conducted on behalf of the German Environment Agency (UBA) by a consortium including INFRAS.

The proportion of electric cars on Swiss roads is expected to continue to rise. To enable this, the canton of Zurich is planning to massively expand its charging infrastructure. INFRAS developed the design of a funding programme on behalf of the cantonal Office of Mobility and Transport.

Which greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions do various vehicle categories cause and how high are a country’s average road traffic emissions? The Handbook Emission Factors for Road Transport (HBEFA) that INFRAS developed provides answers and data.

The transport sector is a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in Switzerland. How can these emissions be reduced in a way that is as economically and socially acceptable as possible? There is still little information available on which to base an answer to this question, which is why it is currently the subject of research by a team from INFRAS and ETH Zurich, as part of the NRP 73 National Research Programme.

Demand for transport is growing rapidly in Indonesia. At the same the country – which has a population of 260 million – must massively reduce its transport-related CO₂ emis­sions. But just how promising are the measures that are planned? INFRAS developed methods to find out, and also supported a local pilot scheme.

Forty to fifty million charging stations will be needed globally by 2030 in order to provide electricity to the growing number of electric vehicles. This will result in a large number of business models for investing and marketing charging infrastructure, as a joint white paper from INFRAS and SUSI Partners shows.