Abstract
Business efficiency, stakeholder pressure and the need for legislative compliance compel the automotive sector to design and manufacture fuel-efficient, low-impact, environmentally responsible and sustainable vehicles. Managing and responding to these multiple and sometimes conflicting interests requires the measurement of economic, environmental and societal performance. Although a number of automotive sustainability measures are mentioned within the literature, there is no single and unique approach for the complete and integrated sustainability assessment of vehicles. This study has developed a comprehensive automotive sustainability assessment framework by selecting a set of sustainability assessment criteria from the literature and refining these through an interview study with 24 automotive experts from academia, car manufacturers, consultancies and non-governmental organisations. Based on this approach, 26 midpoint and 9 end-point environmental, resource, social and economic impact categories have been identified for the construction of a framework for automotive sustainability assessment. The proposed framework can be used as a decision-supporting tool at the early stages of the vehicle development process. It allows source and sustainability issues to be identified throughout the entire vehicle life cycle and provides the means to sharpen analysis and discussion around these issues. The framework can also serve as a design structure for a wide range of sustainability assessment methods and tools (e.g. multi-criteria decision adding or sustainability accounting methods). It serves as guidance on what needs to be measured in an integrated sustainability assessment of vehicles and leaves the choice of what to include in the decision-making process to the discretion of individual companies.
Highlights
The expansion of car-based transport over the last half-century has brought a wide range of ecological and social impacts, such as noise, congestion, accidents, air and water pollution, climate change and resource depletion
Most automotive companies are presently conducting at least an LCA, and by incorporating other areas of sustainability are able to make richer decisions, as emphasised by one respondent: I think it is interesting to see this holistic view on car development
The interviewees' comments were analysed and taken into consideration to build the framework for automotive sustainability assessment, which represents the vehicle life cycle sustainability performance and consists of 26 midpoint and 9 end-point impact categories
Summary
The expansion of car-based transport over the last half-century has brought a wide range of ecological and social impacts, such as noise, congestion, accidents, air and water pollution, climate change and resource depletion (see Graedel and Allenby, 1998; Mayyas et al, 2012). There are many different methods and tools for measuring sustainability performance (see Ness et al, 2007), each of which provides potentially useful, different, insight for decision makers (Ramos and Caeiro, 2010). Despite this diverse range of tools and methods, sustainability assessment criteria and indicators almost always play a fundamental role in any sustainability evaluation (Ramos, 2009; Singh et al, 2012; Cinelli et al, 2014). They are a powerful element of more informed and optimum choices and contribute to a more structured and consistent decision-making process (Pastille, 2002; Mascarenhas et al, 2010)
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