Working Paper

Review of greenhouse gas life-cycle assessments of passenger cars in India

This study explores six life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emission assessments of passenger cars in India, identifying three variables that explained about three-quarters of the variance in life-cycle GHG intensity: grid carbon intensity, test-cycle energy consumption, and the real-world energy consumption adjustment factor.

Our findings translate into several policy considerations:

  • Prioritize immediate adoption of BEVs, while accounting for regional gridmix variations-delaying BEV uptake risks locking in long-term emissions from ICEs as India’s grid gradually decarbonizes.
  • Enforce stringent fuel efficiency standards and give importance to real-world adjustment factors to close the lab-to-road gap, ensuring accurate life cycle emissions accounting and promoting truly energy-efficient vehicles. HEVs exhibit higher deviations from test-cycle performance than ICE, while BEVs consistently demonstrate the highest energy efficiency across all powertrains.
  • Requiring on-board fuel and energy consumption meters to collect real-world data across all powertrains can help to refine future life-cycle assessments and inform evidence-based policy design.
  • Incorporate land-use change impacts in biofuel life cycle assessments, as statistical analysis highlights that biofuel-related emissions are often significantly underestimated in existing studies.
Life-cycle analyses
GHG emissions
India
Privacy Overview
International Council on Clean Transportation

This website uses cookies to enable some basic functionality and also to help us understand how visitors use the site, so that we can improve it.

Essential Cookies

Essential cookies provide basic core functionality, such as saving user preferences. You can disable these cookies in your browser settings.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics to collect anonymous information about how visitors interact with this website and the information we provide here, so that we can improve both over the long run. For more on how we use this information please see our privacy policy.