Europe's first harmonised zero-emission vehicle life cycle assessment guidelines published
The new guidelines establish a single, harmonised life cycle assessment approach to provide transparency and comparability of impacts from these products.
Zero-emission vehicle sales, mostly comprising of pure battery electric vehicles (BEVs), are increasing year-on-year globally. In the EU alone, BEVs made up around 16% of new passenger car registrations and 9.5% of new van registrations in the first half of 2025. New registrations for heavy-duty commercial vehicles increased to 21.6% for buses and 3.6% for lorries in the same period.
To support the transparency and comparability of product impacts, the TranSensus LCA methodology has been published, creating Europe’s first harmonised life cycle assessment (LCA) approach for zero-emission vehicles (ZEV) and batteries. This methodology will facilitate industry, mobility providers, and planners in providing increasingly sustainable products and optimising mobility solutions as needed to combat climate change, while also considering the wider environmental and social impacts of ZEVs.
TranSensus LCA is the result of a 30-month collaborative project involving over 44 organisations from research and industry, funded under the Horizon Europe Framework Programme and has also received funding from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).
The project was developed to address the lack of a standard approach for vehicle LCA, which has led to inconsistency in the LCA approaches adopted, limiting the comparability of results and confusing the messaging on impacts – particularly for ZEVs and batteries. LCA are commonly used in sustainable product development to understand the environmental, social and economic impacts a product will have from design to disposal across its lifetime.
Ricardo, a leading global environmental and engineering consultancy, was a key member of the Steering Committee and TranSensus LCA consortium, which was jointly coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Structural Durability and System Reliability LBF and the Fraunhofer-Institution of Surface Engineering and Thin Films IST.
Nikolas Hill, Head of Vehicle Technologies and Fuels in Ricardo’s Sustainable Transport team said: “We’ve known for some time about the importance of a comprehensive and comparable LCA to ensure greater transparency on the sustainability of a vehicle over its full lifecycle, and to facilitate the fairer comparison of the impacts and benefits of different products and powertrain types.
“By creating this new harmonised methodology and guidelines, manufacturers and other LCA practitioners will be able to identify and compare, in a consistent way, improvements across environmental, social and economic aspects of the ZEV life cycle, which we hope will help improve sustainable performance, create new business opportunities in markets, and allow for better decisions by consumers and also policy-makers.”
In addition to supporting the TranSensus LCA, Ricardo, a global leader in vehicle life cycle assessment, works with governments and industry to provide methodological development, critical review, and strategic advice. Our experts are also currently active in related activities aimed at developing the EU’s official regulatory methodology under the CO2 regulations, and globally harmonised guidelines for vehicle LCA as part of the UNECE Automotive LCA Informal Working Group.
The new TranSensus LCA consolidated guidelines were launched in late July 2025 and are available now for download and use from the project website at https://lca4transport.eu/.
Further information on Ricardo’s expertise in life cycle assessment is available on our website: Life cycle assessment.
