Decommissioning Internal-combustion VEhicles (DIVE) Margot Gerritsen Margot Gerritsen
Margot Gerritsen

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For True Decommissioning to be effective, we must couple the permanent removal of ICE LDVs with a quicker than market rate removal. 

ICE LDV removal rates have not increased significantly in the US, even with ZE LDVs increasing to nearly 1.8 million vehicles in 2020, as depicted in Figure 1. The annual percentage of scrapped US LDVs has remained between 4% and 7% since 1995 (US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2014). The total number of ICE LDVs has steadily increased during that time (US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2019). Keith et al. (2019) conducted a simulation that found even under the assumption that all new LDV sales in the US switched to ZE LDVs today, the market would still take an estimated 20 years to reduce ICE LDVs to 10% of the overall fleet. This estimate is possibly an underestimate because the authors used vehicle retirement average values and did not take into account the ever-increasing usable life discussed in the previous section.

LDV Scrappage Rate & number of LDVs on US roads graph
Figure 1: LDV Scrappage Rate and Number of LDVs on US roads | The number of ICE LDVs (right axis) is steadily increasing and the LDV scrappage rate (left axis) has remained fairly constant since 1995. ZE LDVs (right axis) were introduced commercially in 2010 and grew to nearly 1.8 million vehicles on US roads by 2020. Scrappage data ends in 2014 from the BTS; IHS Markit found scrappage rates in 2020 were 5.6%, represented by the blue dot on the graph. (Data Sources: US Bureau of Transportation Statistics, 2019; IHS Markit, 2021)