This is not just about the CO2 emissions of vehicles on the road. In a holistic view, the manufacturing process of electric cars must also be included in the carbon footprint. In 2017, a study was conducted by scientists at the IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute. The result was a sobering conclusion for supporters of electric mobility. It seemed to emerge that electric cars would have no ecological advantage over vehicles with internal combustion engines simply because of the costly production of the drive in the form of lithium-ion batteries . In 2017, the study concluded that an electric vehicle had already lost its global warming potential before the first kilometer driven on the road. Thus, at that time, a vehicle with an electric drive was ecologically no better than an economical combustion engine.
The latest findings lead to different results. This is due, on the one hand, to the fact that the demand for electrical energy for the production of batteries for electric vehicles is lower than originally assumed. The second positive argument in favor of electric propulsion is that the respective production plants are now predominantly powered by electricity from renewable sources. These two factors have improved the view of electric cars.
One argument that is still missing from this consideration is the conditions under which the production of electric cars takes place. There is additional potential in the optimization of production and intralogistics processes in the automotive industry to improve the life cycle assessment in the manufacture of electric vehicles. This should be exploited.