Alexander Kihm

• The car market is one of the central areas of climate policy, as cars account for one of the largest shares in greenhouse gas emissions. Several measures and technologies have been researched or implemented, such as emission limits, emission-based taxes or new engine types. Of the latter, especially electric cars are hoped to reduce the carbon-intensity of transport. Taking this as a starting point, this dissertation first undertakes an analysis of the total cost of ownership that new car customers are facing to derive an economic market potential for electric cars. The results suggest a viable plugin-hybrid market beginning around 2020. Since most of these cars would be bought by corporate buyers for a short holding period, an important question is how the second-hand market would adopt them afterwards. This question is answered using a hedonic pricing model to identify different valuations of new and used cars. The results indicate that used car customers exhibit different preferences and put more valuation on low fuel consumption, supporting a viable market for efficient cars. But especially in the private market, a household’s decision on the type of car is interrelated with those on how many cars to own and how much to drive them. In order to analyze this highly complex decision, a discrete choice model is developed to simultaneously estimate these three dimensions. Since the current market price of each car is a logically very important parameter, a depreciation sub-model is developed. The results of this nonlinear model are directly used in the discrete choice estimation. The final choice model coefficients verify the interrelation and the central role of fuel cost, but also reveal important socio-demographic factors such as gender, spatial setting and income, whose influence is demonstrated through various simulations.