Fuel Efficiency Rating for EVs Make No Sense, But That Doesn’t Stop Us from Assigning Them

In this edition of Green Auto Digest, my colleague Jon LeSage (pictured) gets at an issue that struck me when I first got interested in electric transportation: the EPA’s mile-per-gallon ratings.  We seem married to assigning MPG equivalents to EVs, even though these figures are clearly meaningless.  

To take the most obvious example, consider plug-in hybrids like the Chevy Volt.  Here, it’s possible for Owner A to drive every single day and not add a drop of gasoline, where Owner B has a long commute or takes long trips, and relies on it almost exclusively.

While it may seem simpler, the case of battery EVs isn’t much more amenable to MPG-e ratings.  Depending on where and when the car is charged, the energy could come exclusive from coal, and exclusive from solar and wind.

This is one of many cases where our society seems to be wedded to assigning numbers to things whether they make sense or not.  Yet in other cases we have good numbers and fail to use them. Quantifying the damage done by fossil fuel consumption is an excellent example.  Harvard Medical School tells us that the hard annual healthcare costs associated with treating the respiratory illness caused by breathing aromatics from coal-fired power plants in the U.S. alone at approximately $500 billion.

One would think that such a figure might be useful in developing a national energy policy.  One would be wrong.