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| It's an orange, stupid. |
Silly question of course, but in the US the EPA have decided that electric vehicles will show range in MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent). The Nissan Leaf's official figure is 99 MPGe and the Chevy Volt's is 60 MPGe (37 MPG gas only, 93 MPGe electricity only, 60 MPGe combined).
The debate rages around what is being measured and included in the comparison. It depends on how clean the electricity used to charge the vehicle is of course. A bit like the fact that official emissions and fuel consumption figures for conventional cars bear little resemblance to real world figures (the real world figures tend to be much worse). As with all cars, it completely excludes the carbon generated in the production of the vehicles, which vary enormously according to size, weight, components, the supply chain, the manufacturing plant, and disposal. This 'dust-to-dirt' figure is the holy grail for EVangelists like me.
The answer is simple, but not it appears easy: forget trying to compare EVs with conventional cars because they are different. Instead, let's introduce a new metric for EVs, that of kWh / km.ie electricity consumption instead of petrol/diesel consumption. It will feel a little weird for about a week and then we would all get used to it. Let's hope European governments adopt this latter approach.
Footnote: As a rule of thumb, it has been estimated that the average conventional car emits a total of 400g CO2 / km 'pit-to-wheel' compared to 100g CO2 / km (worst case) 'well-to-wheel' for electric cars - so the important point to remember is that when all is said and done, the only solution to the environmental problem is to drive a pure electric car. This message unfortunately gets lost amongst all the greenwash.
