The outlook of electric vehicles in Finland and Europe : Understanding the challenges in growth of electrified mobility

Abstract

Electric vehicles play a key role in the future of transportation. The future of passenger transport will be more electric and the transition from ICE vehicles to electric ones is going to happen gradually over the next decades. Progress has been made in the charging network, in the battery capacity, and the overall development of electric vehicles is becoming faster. By many, electric vehicles are expected to be the choice of driving in the future. But the growth of electric vehicles requires the right conditions to succeed: price must be competitive enough, charging network sufficient enough and the driving range long enough. However, in Finland many of these conditions are still not at the level as people want and therefore, they are not buying electric vehicles as much and the sales growth is very slow. The battery industry is expanding fast and many European car manufacturers are investing in electric vehicle technologies, including batteries. This creates pressure to find new sources of raw materials and make the current supply chain much more efficient. Key materials like cobalt and lithium are very concentrated in only a few locations around the globe, creating risk of supply shortages and bottlenecks. Recycling of battery materials is still in the early phase of development in terms of efficiency and needs to be more advanced to fully take advantage of the existing battery materials. Establishing European’s own battery manufacturing production and supply chain of materials for EVs will be challenging but has great potential for future manufacturing. It is estimated that there would be a drastic increase of electric vehicles in Finland by 2030, but as this thesis suggests, with the current rate of development it will take more time than expected. Increasing interest towards electric vehicles keep growing but the automotive industry need to keep developing electric vehicles technology and the infrastructure around them. This thesis focuses to explain more about the growth scenario of electric vehicles and identify the issues related to that. Helping to understand the reasons why growth of electric vehicles is challenging in Finland and even in Europe. The findings of this paper can be useful for people considering buying and EV or need information about them, offers information and an outlook of EVs for policy makers and to other decision makers regarding electric vehicles infrastructure.