Parameters Affecting the Sustainability Trade-off between Production and Use Stages in the Automotive Lightweight Design

Nowadays, lightweight materials and design is one of the means carmakers employ to reduce CO2 emissions according to EU's goals and sustainability principles. In this paper, a comparative analysis between alternative design solutions for Electric Vehicles (EVs) components was carried out using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing (LCC) methodologies to evaluate the trade-off between impacts from production and use stages. This work is part of the activities of the ENLIGHT European Green Vehicles project, where the objective was to advance highly innovative lightweight material technologies for application in EVs structural parts. The purposes of the study are: i) to evaluate the parameters influencing the trade-off from the environmental and economic perspective; ii) to combine LCA and LCC results interpretations. The results stressed that the trade-off becomes much more sensitive when innovative materials and technologies are applied to EVs lightweighting.