CO2 reduction potentials through the market expansion and lifetime extension of used cars

1 Background Global warming has been getting more serious and made many countries consider measures for reducing CO2 emissions (IPCC 2015). For this reason, global warming is an urgent issue to address through effective CO2 emission reduction policies. Considering global CO2 emissions in 2013 by sector, the second largest volume comes from the transportation sector, which accounts for 23% of the global CO2 emissions. Because of a continued large contribution by the transportation sector, Melaina and Webster (2011) performed an analysis on the light vehicle sector in the USA and proposed practical measures for achieving CO2 reduction targets. In Japan, the transportation sector generated 17% of the total amount of CO2 emissions in 2012 (Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism; MLIT 2013), which marks an 4% increase during 1990–2012, due to the increase in the transportation volume of passenger cars (Ministry of the Environment 2014). The market expansion of new and used passenger cars also affects the environment, because expanding the market of new passenger cars with relatively high fuel efficiencies Abstract