The Leaderboard aims to establish a new expectation – and competitive advantage – for what it means to produce a truly clean car: not just an electric vehicle (EV), but an EV with an equitable, sustainable, and fossil-free supply chain.
The Leaderboard covers two main aspects of company policies and practices: those focused on building fossil-free and environmentally sustainable supply chains, and those focused on ensuring respect for human rights and responsible sourcing throughout their supply chains. Companies are given a percentage score enabling an assessment of both how close each automaker is to the scorecard’s expectations of what constitutes a clean car, as well as comparisons between automakers.
This year’s analysis includes over 1,500 data points and evaluates each company across more than 80 indicators, assessing their performance on addressing climate, environmental, and human rights impacts within their supply chains. The Leaderboard is based on an analysis of publicly available company reporting that has received board level sign off. The cut-off date for company disclosures to be included in the analysis was July 01, 2026.
Key findings
This year’s Leaderboard findings show that momentum is building towards an even cleaner EV—one that runs on electricity and is built using decarbonized and circular materials, such as fossil-free steel and recycled battery minerals, and in a manner that respects the rights of workers and communities throughout its value chain.
The best-in-class score—the highest score an automaker could achieve simply by emulating the existing best practices of peers across different areas—now stands at 86%, demonstrating that clean and equitable supply chains are attainable. The average score across all 18 automakers has risen for the third consecutive year, showing continued momentum.
Automakers have made the most substantial improvements to their overall approaches to addressing environmental and human rights impacts in their supply chains: the average score in this area has nearly doubled since the first edition of the Leaderboard in 2023.
Progress has been significantly slower in the six specific issue-areas evaluated by the Leaderboard, where the average score increased by just 7 percentage points between 2023 and 2026. Progress in these areas is crucial, as they evaluate automakers’ efforts to address critically important sources of environmental and human rights risks and impacts in their EV supply chains.
For the first time since the Leaderboard was launched, automakers that have taken initial steps on Indigenous Peoples’ rights are in the majority: they now represent 12 of the 18 automakers, when there were only 6 in 2023. Automaker action on clean and equitable supply chains has decisively shifted from the margins to the mainstream.
A core group of industry leaders – Ford, Mercedes, Tesla, Volvo and Volkswagen – are pushing further ahead. These companies at the head of the pack have achieved a rate of progress that is double that of the remaining 13 companies since the first edition of the Leaderboard, and are starting to implement more effective practices for decarbonizing the materials used in their vehicles and mitigating environmental and human rights abuses in their supply chains.
