If you buy a new electric carthere are a few different facts and figures you may want to consider before the battery-powered plunge. The important number is your electric vehicle range, as it indicates how far you can go with a full battery, while ranking MPGe trying to provide an easy way to compare efficiency in electric cars and gasoline-powered models. However, a new study has found that the ratings of many EVs are much less reliable than their gas-powered counterparts.
In case you lost it:
study, published by industry body SAE International, compared range ratings for 365 gasoline-powered cars and 44 battery-powered cars. To do this, Gregory Pannone, former head of fuel economy at Chrysler, and Dave VanderWerp, director of vehicle testing at Car and Driver, Run the cars through a series of tests.
Through the test drive made with cars powered by internal combustion engines, the researchers found that the cars performed four percent better in terms of fuel economy than they were rated for. In fact, the team found that 66% of the gas-powered cars tested achieved MPG numbers higher than their labeled values.
However, the results weren’t very positive for the battery-powered models the team tested. The newspaper reported:
“Most of the BEVs tested to date have failed to achieve both power consumption and range label values. For BEVs, the disparity between label and road and range consumption is exacerbated by other factors, such as extreme temperatures and automakers’ recommendations for fuel consumption. charging less than 100 percent to prolong battery life.
Through their testing, the team discovered that electric vehicles performed 12.5 percent below their assessment range Medium. In fact, only 10 of the vehicles tested passed the estimated range, representing only 17% of the 44 vehicles in the study. These results “would not have been expected if the labeling process for BEVs were equally robust in capturing adjustments on the road,” the researchers say.
The difference between an electric car’s actual range and the range its manufacturers predict depends entirely on how it’s calculated. According to the article, electric vehicles are allowed adjustment factor from 0.7 or more, which means the calculated range is multiplied by 0.7 to give the range estimate. In practice, this means the estimate is 30 percent lower than the calculated range.
In contrast, gasoline-powered cars must have a correction factor of 0.7 or less, which means the MPG rating will be more conservative. This adjustment factor, along with things like temperature and battery health, all mean that real-world BEV ranges are more likely to be lower than advertised. The newspaper added:
“These results therefore support the need to reevaluate the labeling process for this emerging technology as it continues to become increasingly prominent in the market.”
This conclusion is clearly something that regulators have also come to, as the US government recently announced that it is reviewing mileage ratings for electric vehicles sold in the states. In the first day of this month, regulators claim they are cracking down on the MPGe estimates for EVs, which would drop the ratings by a third if they were in effect.
