New Fuel Economy Labels Proposed

It is difficult to be fair when one person has PV solar at home, one has 100% coal-fired electricity, one has 100% hydro electricity, and most have a varied mixture of fossil and renewable. If you follow American football, they just punted. Since it favors EV, that at least gives us the chance to get a foothold of EV cars, then clean up the grid over time.

 

I know that 99% of this angst over the label is posturing for the car companies. All I want to know is kwh/one-mile using electricity, or gallons/one-mile using petrol in a couple different drive cycles.

The fantasy customer who is shopping for an EV or PHEV who cannot take the above numbers and perform the arithmetic for their own situation does not exist. Those folk are driving SUVs and trucks, and have no interest in bleeding edge *EVs. As electrification progresses and and petrol becomes more expensive, the american moron will learn what a kwh is and adapt.

 

The label based on just the tail pipe emission is very misleading. See below greenhouse gas emission graph from a research done by U.S Dept of Energy. PHEV-10 is a 10 miles EV range blend type (Toyota / Ford power-split) and PHEV-40 is series plugin (Volt type). There are more info I posted in this thread.



Source

 

Heh, I have exactly those graphs copied in my scrapbook too ;-)

There is an interesting tidbit to be gleamed from the gasoline CS figures. Since we know that a Prius 14 PHV gets 50 mpg, and the Volt emits 325 grams vs the Prius' 250 grams per NREL, this works out to 35 mpg for the Volt in CS mode.

 

Not correct. If you want to take the worst power source, let us also take the worst oil source. Tar sands oil shipped by tanker. How does that compare ?

BTW, in my city the power utility is carbon neutral. So, for me it is indeed zero emission. Same for all the people with PV. Fairly green Californians too.