A Review on Energy, Environmental, and Sustainability Implications of Connected and Automated Vehicles

By Morteza Taiebat, Austin L. Brown, H. Safford, Shen Qu, Ming Xu. Environmental Science and Technology, 2018

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) are poised to reshape transportation and mobility by replacing humans as the driver and service provider. While the primary stated motivation for vehicle automation is to improve safety and convenience of road mobility, this transformation also provides a valuable opportunity to improve vehicle energy efficiency and reduce emissions in the transportation sector. Progress in vehicle efficiency and functionality, however, does not necessarily translate to net positive environmental outcomes. Here, we examine the interactions between CAV technology and the environment at four levels of increasing complexity: vehicle, transportation system, urban system, and society. We find that environmental impacts come from CAV-facilitated transformations at all four levels, rather than from CAV technology directly. We anticipate net positive environmental impacts at the vehicle, transportation system, and urban system levels, but expect greater vehicle utilization and shifts in travel patterns at the society level to offset some of these benefits. Focusing on the vehicle-level improvements associated with CAV technology is likely to yield excessively optimistic estimates of environmental benefits. Future research and policy efforts should strive to clarify the extent and possible synergetic effects from a systems level to envisage and address concerns regarding the short- and long-term sustainable adoption of CAV technology.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7b0e72f051177075cace195a75131e3f9c22cfd2

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Automotive Engineering

1. S. Stolper
2. Ming Xu
3. Dongpu Cao
4. Morteza Taiebat

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. S. Stolper
2. Ming Xu
3. Dongpu Cao
4. Morteza Taiebat

In Transportation

1. S. Stolper
2. Ming Xu
3. Morteza Taiebat

Citations in the corpus

• Forecasting the Impact of Connected and Automated Vehicles on Energy Use: A Microeconomic Study of Induced Travel and Energy Rebound (2019, background): “In addition, increased comfort and reduced attention requirements3 will cause the per-mile travel time cost to drop [7], inducing even more additional travel [2,5,8,9].”
• Milestones in Autonomous Driving and Intelligent Vehicles: Survey of Surveys (2023, background): “could bring harms to the environment [157], [158], [159], [160].”
• Unraveling the hidden environmental impacts of AI solutions for environment (2021, unknown): “For example, compared to a standard vehicle the negative impacts of an autonomous vehicle are not only due to the life cycle of (additional) ICT equipment, but also to additional aerodynamic drag due to the presence of LIDAR on the roof [30].”
• The rise of electric vehicles—2020 status and future expectations (2021, unknown): “Taiebat et al 2018 explore the environmental impacts of automated vehicles showing net positive environmental impacts at the local vehicle-urban levels due to improved efficiency, but acknowledge that greater vehicle utilization and shifts in travel patterns might to offset some of these benefits.”