Saudi Arabia’s transport transition plans require evidence that reflects local energy, water, and market conditions, not only tailpipe emissions. This paper develops a normalized sustainability benchmarking framework to compare passenger vehicle powertrains across 12 indicators covering environmental impacts, total cost of ownership, and social risk exposure. Indicators are expressed on a dimensionless scale relative to a conventional internal combustion vehicle baseline, enabling transparent cross-technology comparison without subjective weighting or aggregation. The framework is applied to internal combustion (ICEV), hybrid (HEV), plug-in hybrid (PHEV), and battery electric vehicles (BEV) in Saudi Arabia. Results show that, under current conditions, hybrids provide the most balanced performance, combining meaningful greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions with near cost parity and modest upstream burdens.
