The purpose of this article is to analyze the current state of the research and the trends in the field of Circular Economy (CE) for the automotive industry, with electric vehicles (EVs) and conventional vehicles (CVs), being analyzed separately. A systematic literature search was conducted using the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) method, to screen and select articles from the Clarivate Web of Science database. For the detailed analysis, the information from the selected articles was structured based on such criteria as study objective, findings, limitations, and research proposals, and was further organized into nine categories for EVs, and into four categories for CVs. There were several CE strategies identified in the review, but a major challenge remains the evaluation of these strategies, in order to determine the most relevant, effective, and efficient ones, starting from the goal of minimizing the resource functionality loss. Future studies should focus on promoting new green technologies in the automotive industry, with an emphasis on circularity, in terms of raw materials, energy, production systems, product life extension, second use application, reuse, recycling, and end of life.

Industry, especially the automotive industry is permanently changing and adapting to the external and internal factors. The appearance of the new types of vehicles – electric vehicles, is a big and important step not only regarding the evolution of the product, but also regarding the advantages of reducing environmental impact. It is promoted the idea that an electric vehicle generates less direct emissions in use phase compared with a conventional one. If we limit to this, we could say that we are dealing with an eco-friendly type of vehicle. The question is, can we extend this idea to the other stages of the life cycle? What about the sustainability of the industry? This article highlights the methods of environmental impact assessment used by researchers for electric vehicles in terms of life cycle and sustainability. The findings of this systematic review demonstrate that even if are a large number of articles addressing electric vehicles, only a small number of them evaluate the electric vehicle from life cycle and sustainability point of view.