2. How to carry out an LCA of an electric vehicle?

2.1 The functional unit

For internal combustion vehicles, the functional unit is often formulated as follows: "providing a motor vehicle to transport 4 people and their luggage for 10 years, over a total distance of 150,000 km". Of course, the quantitative data for this functional unit vary according to the studies considered.

The current trend is to consider increasingly longer total distances of use, and in the literature we find functional units of up to 300,000 km – Hawkins et al.