Global Warming Potential of Light-Duty Vehicles: a synthetic model for Local Administrations

The automotive industry is currently at the centre of a critical debate concerning the transition towards sustainable and climate-neutral motorised mobility. This M.Sc. thesis focuses on developing a synthetic model to assess the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of light-duty vehicles, to support local administrations in promoting low-impact mobility. This approach results quite new in literature, according to the state of the art. The GWP emissions have been evaluated for nine vehicles with low or zero CO2 emissions. The effect of two production scenarios, i.e., Europe and extra-Europe, has been analysed to assess the environmental impacts of the same vehicle under different energy mixes. The developed methodology is based on the LCA approach limited to GWP analysis. The study set has been limited to the most CO2eq-intensive emission phases: raw materials extraction and use for production, motor-vehicle assembly, battery production and logistics. The data used for the analysis of each vehicle included the bill of materials (BOM), specification data and emission factors, the latter obtained from the car manufacturer’s database. The most relevant challenge encountered during the study, represented by the very large number of parts to be analysed in the BOM (e.g. > 2000 parts per vehicle), has been effectively solved with a MATLAB ad-hoc model allowing a rapid and semi-automatic calculation of the vehicle mass breakdown. The computation of the total GWP emissions of the nine vehicles has enabled the definition, for each scenario, of a synthetic index, crucial for the development of an easy-to-use mathematical model able to estimate the GWP emissions from vehicle production, excluding batteries. This tool can provide support to the Local Administrations in promoting the use of vehicles with low GWP emissions.