For years, the electric vehicle has been sold as the clean car — better for the planet, better for the future, an antidote to the era of the combustion engine. But a new report released this week punctures some of that promise, revealing that the mining and manufacturing processes behind the world’s most popular EVs remain deeply entangled with coal-fired steel, cobalt mined by children, and communities stripped of land and water to meet the surging global demand for battery minerals.
The fourth annual Lead the Charge Auto Supply Chain Leaderboard, published Monday by a coalition of climate, human rights and investor groups, evaluated 18 of the world’s largest automakers on the cleanliness and ethics of their supply chains. The findings: progress is real, but uneven — and the industry as a whole is still failing to live up to the promise of the electric revolution.
No company scored above 50 percent of the total points available. The industry average sits at just 25 percent. And even the top-ranked automakers — Tesla, Ford, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen — earned their marks largely by outperforming mediocre peers, not by meeting any absolute standard of clean or responsible production.
“An even cleaner EV is within reach. The solutions exist. What remains to be seen is whether the industry has the will.”
Still, the report’s authors take pains to highlight what is working. If every automaker simply adopted the best practices already demonstrated by its competitors in each area, the industry could theoretically achieve a composite score of 86 percent. The tools, they argue, already exist. What is lacking is the will.
A Race to the Top — for a Select Few
Tesla, for the second consecutive year, ranked first overall with a score of 49 percent. The Austin-based automaker’s biggest leap came in battery supply chain transparency, where it posted a 20-percentage-point improvement to become the first company ever to score above 50 percent in that category. Tesla achieved this by becoming the first automaker to fully disclose Scope 3 emissions from battery production, breaking down the individual contributions of lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite — a level of detail that is now becoming the industry benchmark.
Ford finished second at 45 percent, earning the highest marks among any automaker on responsible sourcing — in part because it has made independent auditing by the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance a contractual requirement in its direct lithium agreements with Australian suppliers. Volvo, third at 44 percent, led the industry on supply chain decarbonization and was one of the first to publicly disclose the specific proportion of low-carbon steel used in a new production vehicle, its ES90.
Together, these five leaders — Tesla, Ford, Volvo, Mercedes and Volkswagen — have improved at roughly twice the rate of the remaining 13 automakers since the ranking was first published in 2023. The gap is widening.
The Laggards: Toyota, GM and China’s State Automakers
Toyota, the world’s largest automaker by sales volume, continues to rank near the bottom of the leaderboard, clustered alongside Chinese state-owned manufacturers GAC and SAIC, who have made negligible progress on steel decarbonization or mineral sourcing ethics. For a company that has long positioned itself as an environmental pioneer — the maker of the Prius, the inventor of the mass-market hybrid — the ranking represents a pointed rebuke.
General Motors had perhaps the most embarrassing result of any automaker this year. It was the only company among the 18 evaluated that failed to publish an annual sustainability report, a lapse that cost it points across dozens of indicators and sent it tumbling three positions in the overall rankings, falling behind Geely and Hyundai. Transparency, the report’s authors note, is not merely a communications strategy — it is a prerequisite for accountability.
A GM spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“The human and environmental costs remain severe. Box-ticking audits are not enough.” — Afrewatch International
Chinese Automakers: A Surprising Bright Spot
Among the year’s most notable developments was the improvement of Chinese automakers, a group that has historically lagged on transparency and environmental standards. Geely, the Hangzhou-based conglomerate that owns Volvo, posted some of the strongest gains of any company in the evaluation, developing what the report describes as industry-leading practices on battery recycling and decarbonization. BYD, the world’s largest EV maker by unit sales, also made meaningful first steps — putting in place a new supplier code of conduct and a grievance mechanism for supply chain workers, moves that the report’s authors called encouraging, if long overdue.
Together with Renault, both Geely and BYD achieved the largest score increases of any automakers this year, each improving by nine percentage points. Chinese automakers, as a group, achieved the largest collective improvement.
What the Supply Chain Actually Looks Like
Behind the rankings lies a sprawling and often grim global infrastructure. The average electric vehicle requires roughly six times the mineral inputs of a conventional internal combustion car, according to the International Energy Agency. Those minerals — lithium, cobalt, nickel, graphite, manganese, copper and others — are extracted primarily in countries with weak labor protections, high levels of corruption, and in some cases, active conflict.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, which accounts for more than 60 percent of global cobalt production, miners — including children as young as seven — work in dangerous, unventilated pits using hand tools, exposed to toxic dust and at constant risk of cave-in, according to repeated investigations by Amnesty International and the U.S. Department of Labor. In Indonesia, the world’s leading producer of nickel, a rush of Chinese-backed smelter construction has resulted in the deforestation of hundreds of thousands of hectares and the release of sulfur dioxide and coal ash into communities that rely on fishing and subsistence farming.
The Lead the Charge report found that while Mercedes, Volkswagen and Tesla have published detailed reports on their efforts to address some of these harms — engaging directly with cobalt suppliers in Congo, lithium producers in Chile and Australia, and nickel companies in Indonesia — the majority of automakers have no equivalent disclosure and in many cases cannot trace their mineral supply chains to the mine level.
The Policy Backdrop: Europe Pushes, Washington Pulls Back
The report lands amid a pronounced divergence in government policy. In Europe, the EU Battery Regulation — which requires automakers to trace key battery materials and demonstrate due diligence on human rights and environmental risks as a condition of market access — has provided a powerful regulatory backstop, accelerating transparency and traceability efforts across the industry.
In the United States, the Trump administration has moved in the opposite direction, rolling back vehicle emissions standards, scaling back environmental enforcement, and weakening protections that had applied to supply chain due diligence under previous executive orders.
“As the Trump administration attempts to roll back U.S. climate policy, it is more important than ever for automakers to advance global efforts to clean up their supply chains,” said Katherine García, director of the Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All program. “The auto industry thrives on regulatory certainty, and the current administration is once again throwing the industry into disarray.”
A Path Forward — If the Will Exists
The report’s most striking finding may be its composite 86-percent score — calculated by combining the highest marks achieved by any automaker in each individual category. It is, in effect, a proof of concept: a genuinely clean EV supply chain is not a theoretical aspiration. The practices that would constitute one are already being demonstrated, somewhere in the industry, right now.
Volvo and Mercedes are disclosing specific quantities of low-carbon steel in new models. Ford is requiring third-party mine audits in supplier contracts. Tesla is publishing battery emissions breakdowns that no other automaker has matched. The challenge is not invention. It is adoption.
| RANK | AUTOMAKER | FOSSIL FREE AND ENVIRONMENTALLY SUSTAINABLE SUPPLY CHAINS | HUMAN RIGHTS AND RESPONSIBLE SOURCING | OVERALL LEADERBOARD SCORE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | TESLA | 50% | 48% | 49% |
| 02 | Ford | 40% | 49% | 45% |
| 03 | VOLVO | 55% | 32% | 44% |
| 04 | Mercedes-Benz | 39% | 42% | 41% |
| 05 | VW | 31% | 46% | 39% |
| 06 | BMW | 30% | 39% | 34% |
| 07 | RENAULT | 28% | 35% | 31% |
| 08 | GEELY | 31% | 24% | 27% |
| 09 | HYUNDAI | 21% | 25% | 23% |
| 10 | GM | 20% | 25% | 22% |
| 11 | KIA | 20% | 23% | 21% |
| 12 | STELLANTIS | 14% | 29% | 21% |
| 13 | NISSAN | 13% | 17% | 15% |
| 14 | BYD | 13% | 16% | 14% |
| 15 | HONDA | 8% | 16% | 12% |
| 16 | TOYOTA | 7% | 10% | 9% |
| 17 | GAC | 5% | 2% | 4% |
| 18 | SAIC | 4% | 1% | 3% |