EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

How can our cars become less polluting? An assessment of the environmental improvement potential of cars

Guillaume Leduc, Ignazio Mongelli, Andreas Uihlein and Françoise Nemry

Transport Policy, 2010, vol. 17, issue 6, 409-419

Abstract: This paper presents a systematic overview of the environmental impacts of new average diesel and petrol cars from a life cycle perspective. An analysis of different technical and non-technical improvement options that could be achieved at each stage of a car's life cycle was performed. The consequences of the adoption of these options on the environment were estimated. The results show that some of the options analysed could have a major positive impact on the vehicle efficiency and induce large improvements of the environmental profile of passenger cars. The highest improvements are achievable through more efficient power trains (including hybrid car), and through lightweight cars. For some options, burden shifts from one car life cycle phase to another, or from one environmental problem to another, can occur. The results show that besides the purely technological options, those that imply behavioural changes by the driver may also reduce the environmental burden substantially.

Keywords: Transport; Passenger; car; Environmental; impact; Life; cycle; assessment; (LCA); Technical; improvement; Integrated; product; policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967-070X(10)00057-0
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:trapol:v:17:y:2010:i:6:p:409-419

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

Access Statistics for this article

Transport Policy is currently edited by Y. Hayashi

More articles in Transport Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:trapol:v:17:y:2010:i:6:p:409-419