«carculator»: A webtool for Life Cycle Assessment of passenger vehicles
Petrol, diesel or electric car – which one is the most environmentally friendly? What will this comparison look like in 20 years?
Does it make a difference whether the electricity for the battery car comes from the socket or from the photovoltaic system on your own roof?
And how do fuel cell vehicles perform?
These and many other questions about the environmental impact of passenger cars can be answered with our new online tool, the "carculator".
carculator calculates the complete environmental impacts of passenger cars during production, operation and disposal. These life cycle assessments can be performed for current and future cars (up to the year 2050). The country in which the cars are to drive, the type of electricity and hydrogen generation, the service lifetime of the vehicles and many other parameters that influence the life cycle assessment can be selected.
The results represent the real-life operation of state-of-the-art cars.
In addition to greenhouse gas emissions, many other environmental indicators such as particulate matter formation, ground-level ozone formation, acidification of ecosystems, etc. can be calculated.
carculator represents a milestone in terms of transparency: The vehicle model used for LCA is publicly available, the pre-print version of a scientific article (Sacchi et al. (2020), submitted), which is under review, serves as basic documentation.
carculator uses the results of the LCA activities of the Technology Assessment Group within the framework of SCCER "Mobility" (link: https://sccer-mobility.ch/) and "Heat and Electricity Storage" (link: http://www.sccer-hae.ch/), the ELEGANCY (link: https://www.sintef.no/projectweb/elegancy/) and The Next Generation Policies (link: https://www.mcc-berlin.net/next-generation-policies/mission.html) projects as well as the ESI platform (link: https://www.psi.ch/en/media/esi-platform).
A tutorial on how to use the carculator interface and to adjust the different parameters of the tool to conduct Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of passenger cars is presented in the following video.
We are happy to receive feedback on carculator and questions on the LCA results.