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With the upcoming environmental regulations in Europe, car manufacturers are facing new strategic issues: how far should they get involved in the ELVs treatment and recycling? How to distribute the recycling targets among the 20 000 parts of the car? How to control the use of regulated substance over the whole vehicle? How to make technical decisions which make sense in the long run? To answer this specific question, a tool is proposed in this paper, the Strategic Life Cycle Management matrix (SLCM). SLCM is based on both a life cycle cost approach and an analysis of the maturity/readiness of the considered technology. Application examples are given to demonstrate how this tool is operational.

Under constant pressure through both national and EC-wide regulations as well as increased consumer awareness the automotive industry has become more and more concerned with improving the environmental profiles of its products. Namely the end-of-life aspects have been pushed into the center of interest. Trying to minimize disassembly cost and to increase potential revalorisation profits, companies strive to integrate environmental constraints early in the design phase. This paper describes how Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Design for the Environment (DFE) respectively contribute towards the objective of improved environmental profiles of automotives and especially the handling of end-of-life vehicules.

The Japan Automobile Manufactures Association (JAMA), in pursuit of their goal of “creating products that put a minimum of load on the earth's environment”, have been carrying out an LCA Study related to motor vehicles. At the time of the previous TLC, for a single car taken as a collection of parts, an LCI study of the carbon dioxide emissions and consumption of energy only was carried out. It was based on 17 basic categories of materials and 13 basic manufacturing process categories. At the time of this study, the data obtained was limited to the total material consumption and energy consumption related to the manufacture of a typical 2000cc Japanese passenger car. The current study was focused on a 1500cc gasoline engine 4-door passenger sedan model, and we reclassified into approximately 140 classifications. The production process data was limited to the target model.

Life Cycle Assessment allows us to state the actual environmental impacts of cars on their total life cycle. As such, it provides us help in the design of cleaner cars. This paper demonstrates the usefulness of Life Cycle Assessment in car design through a case study developed for a car manufacturer.