Energy efficiency progress in transport in the EU

For the transport sector, the ODEX is calculated out at the level of 8 modes or vehicle types: cars, trucks, light vehicles, motorcycles, buses, total air transport, rail, and water transport. The overall energy efficiency index aggregates the trends for each transport mode in a single indicator for the whole sector.

For cars, the energy efficiency is measured by the specific consumption, expressed in litre/100km

For the transport of goods (trucks and light vehicles), the unit consumption per ton-km is used, as the main activity is to move goods

For other modes of transport various indicators of unit consumption are used, taking for each mode the most relevant indicator given the statistics available

• toe/passenger for air
• goe/pass-km for passenger rail
• goe/tkm for transport of goods by rail and water
• toe per vehicle for motorcycles and buses

For countries with a limited data coverage, the ODEX is calculated for road, rail, water and air using aggregate unit consumption for these modes.

For rail, water and air, the calculation is based on unit consumption per ton-km or passenger-km.

For road, the indicator used is the fuel consumption of road vehicles per equivalent car relates the total consumption of road transport to a fictitious stock of all road vehicles, measured in terms of a number of equivalent cars.

The data required are the following:

• The total energy consumption of road transport.
• The stock of road vehicles by type
• Coefficients reflecting the difference in average yearly consumption between each type of vehicle and a car (1 truck and  light vehicle = 4 cars equivalent , 1 bus = 15 car equivalent and 1 motorcycle = 0.15 car equivalent)

The variation of the weighted index of the unit consumption between t-1 and t is defined as follows: 

The value at year t can be derived from the value at the previous year by reversing the calculation:

It /It -1= 1/( It -1/It),

ODEX is set at 100 for a reference year and successive values are then derived for each year t by the value of ODEX at year t-1 multiplied by It /It -1.