Electric Honda Fit deemed most fuel efficient car at 118 mpge

why did EPA make it so confusing? How the heck I know?

But it makes little sense since to me MPG is about efficiency and not about how big fuel tank you have. Right?

Because MPGe is basically about how big your "fuel tank" is.

Efficiency would be Miles per kWh.

It is just confusing average joe that doesnt bother to read the fine print.

And btw, Honda agrees with me... they calculated their info and PR based on kWh/100miles not MPGe.

 

I dont see how Moore's law applies at all, under any circumstances and it can not be compared whatsoever with computer hardware advance's that Moore's law is usually used to compare.

Right now battery technology in both computers and cars is crawling and definetly not growing exponentially.

Moore's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

This requires $3k out of pocket expenses, which in lease terms I take to mean capital reduction--something the Fit specifically says it doesn't have. $3k over that period of time is about $100/month, or exactly the same price

I don't. There is no reason at all to think that at the same cost an EV car capable of 118 now will be 150 in 18 months. Battery tech is not progressing fast enough.​

 

Truth is there are cars now that can do 150 miles on battery.

C'mon guys, I am using the idea of Moore's Law loosely, you know, just the basic concept that inventions get better over time.

If I'm wrong in two years...I want a Mulligan....oh shoot, we're not talking golf. I might confuse you guys.

 

MPGe = Miles/kwh *33.7kwh/Ge. Nothing to do with your fuel tank only a way to compare m/kwh and m/gallon. Its just a conversion constant used to relate kwh of electricity to gallons of gas.

No batteries in laptops and cell phones have moved exponetially. It is at a slower exponential rate than moore's law of doubling in 2 years or house's law of doubling in 1.5. DOE estimates a doubling in 7 years for car batteries. People confuse exponential with moore, but it is the movement of many technologies. Car bodies and engines do not follow this at all, and go up with material costs instead of down with time.

Believe me when they actually have a car for sale the stiker will read with both MPGe and kwh/100 miles like everyone else. I have not seen their marketing material though, how does it compare to the other cars?[/quote]

 

Right.

If the above wikipedia quote is correct, then it IS Miles per kWh (times a unit conversion factor of 33.7 kWh / Gallon). This makes it precisely analogous to MPG.

An electric car which gets 100 MPGe would therefore be getting 3 miles per kiloWatt-hour. No measure of tank sized is included.

 

The fit is not the highest kWper mile vehicle for sale . . . It's only a lease ... at which time the end of the lease rolls around . . . and then you have to wave bye bye ... ah la EV1. Maybe that doesn't matter to some.

.

 

It'd mean little even if it could be purchased. Manufacturers can take a loss on a limited-production compliance vehicle so even if it's the most efficient it could be so due to the use of expensive tech that couldn't compete a LEAF in the market.

 

Hmm. I don't get that.

200/(4/30-0.11*.29) = 1971.7384
200/(4/33-0.11*.29) = 2239.3377

And I'd bet that 1,600mi/mo would up the lease price a bit.

 

MPGe isn't complicated. It is, as you say, miles per 33.7 kWh.

Why 33.7 kWh? Because 33.7 kWh of electricity has the same energy potential as one gallon of gas. The EPA created an MPGe scale for all energy forms, such as biodiesel, hydrogen, natural gas, and electricity. They chose a unit for each of these types of fuel that would equal one gallon of gas in energy.

What does 100 MPGe mean? For an electric vehicle, it means the car will go 100 miles with 33.7 kWh of electricity. If you pay ten cents per kWh, that's $3.37 for 100 miles, whereas with gas maybe you pay $3.75 for 50 miles.

The comparison depends on the price of gas and electricity, but they drive the car the same way for all fuel types.

 

To this day, I still marvel at the 33kWh electricity to gas comparison. The reason a barrel of oil runs $80+ to $100+ ... and then even more costs are incurred during the process of delivering it us as gas, is because it takes the equivalent of almost 1/3 of that 33kWh of energy that gas has (as a finished product) ... just to get it to you. Thus, claiming the value of gas is 33kWh is disingenuous.

I'm just saying . . . . if you go fishing and catch tuna that yields 30lbs of fillets, and you used 5lbs of bait squid just so you could end up with 30lbs of tuna fillets ... and it costs you $50 in boat fuel ... plus some amortized value of use on the boat ... and then you pay for 'security' to protect your boat ... and the cost of your poles, line, sinkers, hooks ... tackle box... gues what ... your return on your 30lbs of tuna fillets my not quite be what you think it is ... regardless whether the DOE tells you otherwise.

If it isn't complicated ... then why does gasoline's return on investment never get subtracted from the mix? I guess they figure we're too stupid to understand principals of ROI
.

 

If your car gets 50 MPG and the price of gas doubles, it still gets 50 MPG.

The energy of 33.7 kWh of electricity = the energy of 1 gallon of gas.

That's all there is to it. The cost, amount of pollution, and other externalities don't enter into it. You can use MPGe to compare the efficiency of one EV to another, or you can use it to compare the cost of EV driving to gasoline driving, by calculating cents per mile, like so:
EV Cost = (cost of 33.7 kWh)/MPGe
Gas Cost = (cost of 1 gal of gas)/MPG

Let's take Prius as an example:
EV Cost = $3.70/99= 0.037
Gas Cost = $3.75/50= 0.075

Mine calcs assume 11 cents per kWh. Your cost may vary. Weekly, in fact.

 

Both gasoline and electricity have other costs associated with their production and delivery. You can do a well-to-wheels analysis if you want. However, the EPA wants to isolate their evaluation of cars from all that, otherwise they would need to do a well-to-wheels for every possible scenario. So, if you are talking only about the car, MPGe is a simple comparison, which keeps the old (and admittedly flawed) standard that people are used to.

 

The specification I'm interested in is miles/kilowatt hour and the usable battery capacity in Kwh and the recharge rate. The Fit EV has an estimated 82 mile range using 20 Kwh of electricity which equates to 4.1 miles/kwH which is about 1.0 to 0.5 miles better than the competition (which is very good). It also has a very short 3 hour recharge using a 240VAC recharging station. However, will Honda's new nanotechnology anode Li-Ion battery be as reliable as the competition... will hold out longer than three years? Enterprise rent a car will rent out chevy volts and nissan leaf (65/day) ... hopefully they pick up a Honda Fit EV too??? Electricity cost about 11 cents per kilowatt hour but after you add distribution fees and taxes its more likely to cost between 16 cents to 20 cents per kilowatt hour. The Honda Fit EV battery pack is incrementally more advance than its competition via nanotechnology which is used to redesign its anode/cathode. To make a quantum leap (2x to 10x better) in battery capacity one will have to wait for a new chemistry/material like a air-lithium design -- that's really far off in the future from what I understand...

 

...the problem with MPGe is that it does NOT represent fossil fuel useage equivalents, but many people assume that is exactly what it is.

 

What do you mean by 'fossil fuel usage equivalents'?

 

EPA is not trying to do fossil fuel utility, that changes yearly and regionally.
The DOE does try to weight various fossil fuels against each other in cafe standards. The formulas are old and need to be reworked, as they simply have a factor of anything but gasoline, but DOE in cafe has 82kwh equivalent to about 1 gallon of gasoline.

If we want to compare fuels though, there is no real guideline. They would need to figure utility for coal, natural gas, hydro, wind, solar, etc then calculate for each region.

 

...if you look at the Union of Concerned Scientists recent EV report (small bit below), they talk in terms of equivalent global warming emissions. That's what I am trying so say also. So basically a 100 MPGe car can be as low as 31-40 MPG - fossil fuel equivalents, depending where you live. And I would add, that is from pro-EV group, who failed to mention that it could drop to as low as 20 MPG fossil fuel equiavlents in winter driving conditions.

Yes I know if you have home PV and clean grid it can be much better. My main point is the EPA MPGe number is misleading.

 

I see. I would say rather that it isn't measuring what you are interested in. It would be nice if we had a metric of environmental harm, that we could judge all things with, but I don't know of one.

 

...the problem as I see it many people assume MPGe is the (inverse) metric of environmental harm. If EPA had called their MPGe number something like "gasoline savings index" then it would be more clear. But I liked the way the Union of Concerned Scientists shows it.