New technologies to reduce CO₂ (decarbonization)
The race for decarbonization has begun - a great opportunity to reduce global CO2 emissions. While much attention is paid to car transport as a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, cars account for a smaller proportion of consumption compared to heavy transport, accounting for only 7% of global emissions. Together with cars, trucks, buses and ships cause 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
In the USA, trucks and buses represents only 5% of vehicles on roads but are responsible for 29% of emissions due to lower fuel efficiency and higher utilization!
Some new technologies have the potential not only to decarbonize heavy traffic. Political support and corporate efforts to develop new innovative technologies are helping to lower the cost curve. The development of these technologies will have a serious impact on the automotive, logistics and energy markets, among others, in the next decade.
Electromobility
Electric cars are called "emission-free" because, unlike the internal combustion engine, they do not produce any direct emissions when driving. In a life cycle analysis, the CO₂ emissions that occur during the production of the respective vehicle are significantly higher than for cars with combustion engines. This is due to the energy-intensive production and disposal of the battery cells. In addition, electricity cannot be stored and its generation via nuclear power plants was taboo yesterday and our networks, including households, would have to be completely rebuilt for this.
Since more and more electric cars with real ranges of 300 to 400 kilometres and fast charging capacities of up to 350 kW are coming onto the market and the fast charging network is growing at the same time, it is becoming increasingly easier to cover longer distances with electric cars.
Hydrogen
The potential for hydrogen and fuel cells in industry, transportation and stationary power plants is promising. In industrial use, the technology could contribute to the decarbonization of large industries such as the steel industry. In transportation, it could be used to power a variety of trucks, buses, ships, trains and planes. To do this, however, the infrastructure (petrol stations) must first be set up. This will take some time. In addition to poor efficiency (2-3x worse than with the combustion engine) and the high costs for the infrastructure, there are also higher acquisition and maintenance costs. In the future, hydrogen will play a fundamental role in many areas – just not in cars.
ChipTuning
Chip tuning does not replace the fossil fuels with something else. As a result, there is no need to adjust the infrastructure or take hidden costs into account. Chip tuning increases performance and since it is very rare that you can actually use it, the driver adapts his driving style to the new circumstances after a short time in order to drive the same as before. In most cases, this results in reduced consumption of up to 5-10%, depending on the engine and application. This reduction in consumption allows us to treat our fossil fuels more gently and thus indirectly contribute to CO₂ reduction and decarbonization.
ChipTuning is a reprogramming of the engine control unit and offers more possibilities for tuning. Of course, the increase in performance that can be achieved and – often even more importantly – the development of performance depend heavily on the skills of the programmer.