Greg Marsden

Total cost of ownership (TCO) studies mostly examine new vehicle purchase. This study calculates TCO for 15 vehicles spanning five powertrains and three sizes in the United Kingdom, across three-year first-, second- and third-hand ownership and leasing. No powertrain is superior under all conditions. Hybrid and petrol vehicles have the lowest first-ownership TCO in the small and medium segments, whereas battery electric vehicles (BEVs) gain an advantage in later periods, the small BEV becoming the cheapest option. Leasing improves BEV competitiveness, particularly in the large segment, where the BEV moves from relatively expensive to cheapest. Insurance, however, becomes a structural pressure on BEVs, emerging as the main TCO driver for the medium BEV in the third period. These findings support policies beyond new vehicle incentives, including used BEV incentives and insurance regulation. BEVs’ structural resilience to energy price volatility suggests that renewable energy investment and BEV adoption will be complementary.

The transition to electric mobility from fossil fuel vehicles is underway. New legislation in many countries specifies the proportions of new car sales that need to be zero emission at the tailpipe. However, the focus on new car sales is only one part of a complex mix of changes that will define the efficacy of decarbonisation pathways. Variables such as total fleet size, sales volumes, vehicle size, retirement rates, and mileage distribution across vehicle ages all matter. This paper presents results from a stock-flow model of the Great British car fleet, integrating historic fleet data (2014-2024) across five fuel types and five vehicle sizes. Scenario analysis varies sales volume, fleet size, technology mix, and retirement rates. Policy-based assumptions show a 65% emissions overshoot by 2035. Weakening the phase-out increases overshoot by 6%, while intensive use of zero-emission vehicles could still achieve carbon goals.

This chapter explores how we think about mobility. To talk about changing mobilities, we need to take a multidisciplinary perspective on what drives the urge to move, how this evolves, how it is distributed, and how that distribution confers very different rights and opportunities on people. We take a relational perspective, which understands the possibilities of normalcy and difference through a comparative lens. Using insights from Sheller’s writing on mobility justice, we look well beyond the distribution of spatial opportunities and transport system provision to the processes that make and remake the patterns which we see. We address mobility and immobility, physical and virtual mobility, and their interaction. The chapter argues that, despite the dominance of the growth of movement in statistics and the narratives of growth that surround them, there is potential for change. There are observable societal changes, to which mobility patterns are intrinsically linked, which show new futures being written. However, the tools and analytical frameworks that dominate transport marginalise such possibilities, leading to insipid and ineffective proposals for policy intervention. The chapter makes the case that if we move beyond a blank canvas of planning and recognise the inevitability of the social and political nature of the transformative change required, then new possibilities could emerge.

Through the course of the book, we have set out how incremental change within the current decision-making paradigm will not deliver progress against the demands of the climate emergency. This chapter explores why current politics and decision-making processes fail to address the climate crisis, which is unfolding, and the social innovation emerging from local initiatives and the mobile undercommons. It sets out why the long-standing logics and practices that embed business-as-usual policies will, in any case, break down in the face of a changing climate. The chapter concludes that there are reasons to believe that institutions, politics, and policies can change rapidly, but that this is not necessarily generated from within dominant technocratic hegemonies such as those that shape the transport system. We suggest the need for a more ambitious form of experimentation and openness to social change than is currently recognised, setting the challenge for the subsequent chapter on “Acting Differently”.

Modern mobile lifestyles are unsustainable. In this chapter, we examine how they have come to be so deeply embedded in societies across the world that they are extremely hard to decarbonise. We set this against the already unfolding consequences and disastrous futures of climate change and ecological overshoot to understand the urgency of rapid and radical change. Taking a perspective inspired by the mobilities paradigm, we argue that changing mobilities is a matter of acknowledging that mobilities are social, material, and political practices that are always changing, that need to change, and, in fact, are changing in ways that make new forms and im|mobilities of good living or buen vivir a distinct possibility.

Climate change demands rapid and radical changes in the way people on Earth live and move. Mobility systems the world over must change; and they are changing. Massive global efforts are underway to make transport more sustainable. However, this is mainly focused on technological solutions, such as electrifying automobility, even air travel, and the pace and scale of change is insufficient. The inequalities of existing and changing mobility systems are inhuman. So, how can we change mobilities better? Which are the areas and dimensions where “better” matters most? And what approaches can we take – given that the initiatives already under way are pushing hard? What more can we do? And, most importantly, how can we do it, and do it fairly? Changing Mobilities explores key dimensions of change. The book takes the reader on a journey, beginning with establishing the imperative to act. Having established the urgency to act, it reflects on the struggle for radical transformation between activism and vested interests and discusses the potential of different approaches. It then turns to exploring why change seems so hard, or is so strongly resisted, exploring issues of inter- and intra-generational inequities of consumption of mobility, finding within the macro narrative opportunities to build on by recognising these differences. The final part of the book reflects on the need to change not just behaviours but institutions. It does this by reviewing how institutions operate today and why they might resist adapting to the new reality. It offers a hopeful reading of how to overcome the barriers to radical change by recognising, exploring, and accelerating the change already here and the change potential that exists through agonistic experimentation. Change is going to happen as a result of global warming – this book argues that we need to move to a more adaptive and radical footing to enable society to continue to flourish. This book is aimed at researchers, practitioners and citizens who want to bring about positive change for their communities. The book allows a deep dive into the systemic problem of climate change, but also provides examples of how research can work with communities to both think and act differently. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 International license.

This chapter explores the relational issues that underpin the framing of a need to change mobility systems and the mechanisms through which change can be enacted. It juxtaposes localism and globalism and problematises scalar systems of governance which seek to compartmentalise the scope for action. In dividing the chapter up into international, national, and then local, we deliberately play with the apparently clear dividing lines between responsibilities for climate change allocated on the basis of voting rights. Whilst some international organising mechanism has to exist, and it is the one that the climate emergency will play out under, we show that in a globalised system of consumption and provision, there is no “now-here” without a “now-there”. By considering what “now-here” means in different contexts, we open up a dialogue over what local or national action really means, and whether there is an appetite to even recognise, never mind address, global inequity.

Having reflected on how the machinery of the mobile technology of neoliberal capitalism captures governance, planning, and publics alike, allowing “planning to fail” and propping up deadly business-as-usual auto-, aero-, and cargo-mobility systems, we discuss strategies to enable change in this chapter. Recognising that we cannot wholesale design alternative mobility systems a la Buckminster Fuller, because they must be grown organically through collective action, we explore what we can do to create conditions for such growth. We draw on a groundswell of flourishing innovative initiatives, many of them driven by the refusal of neoliberal, patriarchal, colonial logics, solidarity, study, and confluence by a mobile undercommons. As routes towards better certainties, social and climate justice, and mobilities of buen vivir emerge from this multitude of initiatives, this chapter delineates two methods we are developing to strategically support them and grow radical change – societal readiness assessment and adaptive experimentation. We delineate what difference such mobile methods could make, specifically by supporting imagination through agonistic democracy.

From calculations of journey time, comfort, and cost to the defeatist “it’s too late to stop climate change”, changing mobilities is tied to changing our understanding and practices of time. This chapter examines mobile temporalities from deep time to the present urgency for action. Many current prognoses for limiting global warming talk in terms of timescales that are already used up. International agreements are set out to 2050, but these are artificial and political dates against which the consequences of different levels of action can be manipulated. Yet the business of time in the transportation industries, which sell mobility, is about the seconds, minutes, or hours that people can save by choosing one route or one form of transport over another. Reducing time spent travelling has been at the heart of planning for transport for a century or more. These are the same seconds, minutes, and hours that tick as we pass further into dangerous planetary conditions, yet also somehow fundamentally disconnected from that. In this chapter, we review the importance of time and, in particular, the urgency to act which, we suggest, were it to really be recognised, would trigger different responses to those we observe.