Abstract
Due to the rapid growth in the total number of vehicles in China, energy consumption and environmental pollution are serious problems. The development of electric vehicles (EVs) has become one of the important measures for solving these problems. As EVs are in a period of rapid development, sustainability research on them is conducive to the timely discovery of—and solution to—problems in the development process, but current research on the sustainability of EVs is still scarce. Based on the strategic development direction of EVs in China, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) were chosen as the research object of this study. The theory and method of the life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) were used to study the sustainability of BEVs. Specifically, the indicators of the life cycle assessment (LCA) were constructed, and the GaBi software was used to assess the environmental dimensions. The framework of life cycle costing (LCC) was used to assess the economic dimensions from the perspective of consumers. The indicators of the social life cycle assessment (SLCA) of stakeholders were constructed to assess the social dimension. Then, the method of the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) was selected for multicriteria decision-making in order to integrate the three dimensions. A specific conclusion was drawn from a comparison of BEVs and internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs). The study found that the life cycle sustainability of ICEVs in China was better than that of BEVs. This result might be unexpected, but there were reasons for it. Through sensitivity analysis, it was concluded that the current power structure and energy consumption in the operation phase of BEVs had a higher environmental impact, and the high cost of batteries and the government subsidy policy had a higher impact on the cost of BEVs. Corresponding suggestions are put forward at the end of the article.
Highlights
In response to global climate change, energy consumption, and environmental pollution, many countries are setting targets for energy conservation and emission reduction and actively carrying out innovative actions to achieve sustainable development
Some focused on the establishment of cost analysis frameworks [31], some took the partial cost of an electric vehicle as the research object [32,33], and some concluded that the cost of electric vehicles (EVs) was generally higher than that of other vehicles [34,35,36,37]
This study only considered that owners of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) installed their own charging piles to charge their vehicles, at the same price as residential electricity
Summary
In response to global climate change, energy consumption, and environmental pollution, many countries are setting targets for energy conservation and emission reduction and actively carrying out innovative actions to achieve sustainable development. The LCC research on BEVs was mainly concerned with energy costs and subsidy policies In these studies, some focused on the establishment of cost analysis frameworks [31], some took the partial cost of an electric vehicle as the research object [32,33], and some concluded that the cost of EVs was generally higher than that of other vehicles [34,35,36,37]. This study took China as the research context and used BEVs as the research object to carry out a life cycle sustainability assessment. Related research on EVs in China is almost non-existent, and this study enriches the application cases of LCSA. Research on EVs using SLCA did not exist, and this study is the first to carry out an SLCA application to BEVs
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