Integrating Life Cycle Assessment and TOPSIS for Product-Level Sustainability Evaluation of Automotive Vehicles

Against the backdrop of the automotive industry’s transition to low-carbon operations, assessing the sustainability of pure electric vehicle products remains crucial. Existing multi-criteria evaluation methods often follow a compensatory logic, allowing high carbon emissions to be offset by other advantages. This contradicts the core principle that sustainability must be non-negotiable. To address this issue, we propose a two-stage non-compensatory evaluation framework. First, we apply a carbon footprint threshold based on life cycle assessment: any candidate vehicle exceeding this threshold is eliminated. Second, the remaining models are evaluated across ten indicators (economic, social, and technical), and a comprehensive ranking is generated using entropy weighting, fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP), and the TOPSIS method. This framework has been validated on seven mainstream BEV midsize sedans. The results show that the non-compensatory screening mechanism eliminated two high-carbon-emission models, confirming that environmental criteria must be considered independently. The top-ranked model was not the one with the lowest carbon emissions but rather the one demonstrating balanced performance, indicating that environmental performance and overall competitiveness can be enhanced synergistically. The ranking results remained relatively robust even under a combination of objective and subjective weightings. This study provides a more logically consistent tool for evaluating pure electric vehicles at the product level.