A digital platform for total cost of ownership assessment of sustainable mobility options

Abstract The transition to sustainable mobility requires decision-support tools that move beyond purchase price comparisons and capture the full total cost of ownership (TCO) of competing vehicle technologies. This paper presents a digital platform for comparing internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), and battery electric vehicles (BEVs) under user specific mobility profiles and Portuguese charging conditions. The platform combines vehicle attributes, annual mileage, tariff-aware charging allocation, maintenance coefficients, depreciation, taxes, incentives, and charging infrastructure costs in a modular eight-year TCO formulation. Two representative case studies show that BEVs achieve the lowest TCO, with values of approximately 24,950€ and 27,800€, corresponding to savings of about 12–13% relative to PHEVs and 20–26% relative to ICEVs. A structured validation strategy based on observed tariff benchmarks, implementation cases, public market consistency checks, and deterministic stress tests was used to examine model credibility. One-way sensitivity analysis shows that purchase price, depreciation, annual mileage, fuel price, electricity price, and the share of public charging are the main economic drivers. The study contributes to a transparent engineering oriented platform architecture, a tariff-aware decision engine, and a scalable scenario evaluation framework that can support future integration of environmental indicators, predictive maintenance, and secure charging network interoperability.