Projecting AV sales in the EU-27 and UK: Insights from Euro emission standards and historical trends

Abstract

The adoption of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) stands as a substantial area of study within the existing literature, explored through various approaches like sales estimation, expert insights, and historical technology adoption patterns. However, most studies have focused on specific countries or individual aspects of AV adoption (e.g., user acceptance, safety, societal impacts), without integrating the interplay between regulatory standards, technological advancements, and historical sales data, leaving a significant gap in understanding the long-term adoption patterns across the entire EU-27 and the UK. In this research, we address this gap by employing a combined approach that utilizes sales estimation and historical adoption patterns of car-related technologies to produce a sequential, long-term prediction of AV adoption across the EU-27 and the UK. This combination is facilitated through examining new vehicle registrations that adhere to European vehicle emission standards between 2001 and 2020, using data from the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT). The objective is to develop two robust unified predictive models, the first derivative Logistic model and the Gaussian model, explaining historical sales trends and forecasting future vehicle registrations, incorporating Euro 7 features, vehicle electrification, and autonomous driving features. We find that both generated models demonstrate a reasonable to excellent fit with the historical trends and predict the advent of AVs in the market, with the Gaussian model predicting an earlier peak in AV registrations (in 2042) compared to the first derivative Logistic model (in 2044). Furthermore, the Gaussian model projects significantly higher start year sales for AVs (8.6 million new registrations) than the other model's much lower estimation (below 2.5 million new registrations). This research represents the first study to investigate the long-term adoption of AVs across the entire EU-27 and the UK, providing a novel forecasting approach that integrates multiple technological advancements and regulatory influences.