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Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an important tool while considering the environmental impacts. Nevertheless, setting the scope has been very complicated, especially for complex products, such as an automobile. One way of surpassing this difficult, whenever possible, is through observing others LCA. Our objective in this study is to set boundaries to develop a LCA and to verify releases into the air during the life cycle of an average automobile in the fleet of Brazil. The main conclusion was that the old fleet is responsible for great part of some air pollutant emissions and the deterioration of it resulted in even higher emissions.

In this paper the perspectives for the use of alternatives energy forms for motor vehicles in Brazil are assessed, within a time period up to the year 2010. For this purpose, the state-of-the-art of the several alternatives has been analyzed, concerning in both production and end-use of the energy forms. The main international experiences and the perspectives for their evolution have been examined. The environmental question, the security of energy supply and the interests of the car and oil industries are taken into account as factors pushing forward the development of alternative energy forms, while the likely evolution of oil and oil products prices and the cost trends of the alternatives are identified as restricting factors. The energy alternatives for motor vehicles evaluated in this paper comprise the synthetic fuels obtained from fossil resources, the biomass derived fuels, natural gas, electricity and hydrogen.