Life Cycle Assessment of Electric Vehicles

In recent years, both in France and around the world, the electrification of the vehicle fleet has seen accelerated growth. This is in response to the need to decarbonize the economy on a massive scale, and is being achieved under the combined pressure of regulations and public expectations. Clearly, the electric vehicle eliminates combustion emissions during use, but does this make it a credible solution for decarbonized mobility? In other words, does the electric vehicle offer genuine environmental benefits? And if so, is this true in all contexts? Are there trade-offs depending on the impacts considered?

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is the ideal tool for addressing these issues. And conversely, the example of electric vehicles is often used to explain to the general public the fundamentals of LCA, with the transfer of impacts between stages of the life cycle: a "zero-emission" vehicle, certainly in use, but for which electricity must be produced to power it, and upstream batteries that will have to be recycled at the end of its life. This simple, familiar case study is a perfect illustration of the concept of the "life cycle", the only way to make a valid diagnosis of a vehicle's environmental impact, and compare it on a reliable basis with other types of vehicle, whether thermal, hybrid or hydrogen-powered...

The subject is also of interest to public authorities, professionals and experts, as evidenced by the extensive literature available on the subject on every continent. In France, for example, Ademe commissioned a comparative LCA study of electric and combustion-powered vehicles, published in 2013, with a view to informing the government's choices. . Some ten years later, the results are still largely valid, as the study was prospective and the hypotheses were generally confirmed.

It's also a subject of study for professionals in the automotive industry, who have been carrying out LCAs on their vehicles for many years, either to communicate with their customers, or to guide design choices with a view to reducing environmental impacts – - this is known as eco-design –- or, more recently, to assess their overall corporate environmental performance on a perimeter that includes the use of the vehicles...