Development of a conceptual sustainability assessment framework : A sustainability assessment of autonomous vehicles

Abstract: Today’s sustainability assessment frameworks are no longer applicable when evaluating the newautomotive vehicles. Therefore, the need for suitable automotive evaluation frameworks increasesas companies and scientists are trying to predict the important sustainability characteristics oftomorrows car and how it will affect our societies. The goal is to create a conceptual sustainabilityassessment framework to solve the very complex question of what the most important criteria areand how this new transportation type might affect our society. This is done using a systemapproach, a method that is suitable for studying interrelations between the influencing factors incomplex problems like the one between the sustainability dimensions. Scenario analysis has beenused in order to create the future environment and do a segmentation of the plausible concepts offuturistic transportation options. The evaluation criteria have been developed by gatheringinformation through a literature study and from primary sources via interviews.The resulting framework is composed of 19 evaluation criteria from the different dimensions ofsustainability. The framework allows the user to insert a futuristic concept and evaluate it tocompare a numeric score to other concepts to get indicators of how sustainable the concept is. Thesegmentation of futuristic vehicles shows that the most plausible types of automated vehicles areshared taxis, non-shared taxis and privately owned vehicles, all affecting society differently.The thematic analysis of the criteria has shown that there some relationships and types of criteriathat are more important than others. The most essential discovered correlations between criteriaare: Production and affordability and also maintenance & operation and affordability, affordabilitywith accessibility, affordability & accessibility and traffic volumes and further traffic Volumesand pollution. The developed framework is believed to have the desired function of creating a trustworthyassessment of autonomous vehicles based on the literature study and previous discoveries withinthe field. The evaluation of the different segments is left for future work.