Environmental life cycle impacts of autonomous e-shuttle busses and consequences for assessing future mobility systems

The presentations provides LCA (Life-cycle assessment) results on using autonomous electric shuttle busses in public transportation, highlights specific challenges of conducting such assessments, and draws conclusions for more life cycle and sustainability assessments of future mobility systems that include such vehicles. An attributional LCA study is carried out as part of the EU Horizon 2020 project AVENUE (Autonomous Vehicles to Evolve to a New Urban Experience).Based on these results and on a comprehensive literature review,the requirements and challenges for future mobility system assessments are explored with a consequential LCA mindset. Results highlight the importance of including the sophisticated hard-and software landscape for autonomous vehicles into LCA studies, the specific challenges of defining adequate functional units and reference flows in public transportation systems, and the difficulties of incorporating technology (non-)readiness into the assessment.