I’ve looked a little at the alternative fuel vehicles lately, not so much because I plan to buy one but just out of curiosity. It seems the electric and CNG vehicles list their economy as “equivalent gasoline mpg”. This is utterly ridiculous. They have to assume a certain price for the electricity/CNG and for the gasoline all of which varies significantly across the country especially for electricity.
If the electric car companies would list their vehicles as consuming so many kilojoules or watt-hours per mile, it would be a pretty easy task to look at my electricity bill and figure up the cost per mile and compare that with a typical gasoline vehicles. But no, they want to assume my electricity bill is at a certain rate and provide me with numbers that are meaningless. If the CNG car companies would just list the true mpg of their vehicles, it would also be easy to convert. I just looked up the price of CNG at the nearest station, so if I knew the efficiency of a CNG vehicle, it would be very easy to convert it to money per mile and compare it to gasoline vehicles but no, they again want to provide numbers that are completely meaningless to me.
Now I don’t doubt that you can find the true efficiency of these vehicles if you look hard enough, but I’m really not that interested. I just wanted to know how they’re keeping up with gasoline vehicles but it seems the car manufacturers want to keep the necessary information a secret. It kind of smells like a scam to me and turns me off from wanting to buy one. If I can’t do my own calculations using my own circumstances, then I’m going to just stick with what has been working for me.
They do it this way because multiplying a number of kilowatt-hours by a price per kilowatt-hour is more math than the vast majority of Americans are willing to do. They’re not trying to keep it a secret; quite the contrary, they’re trying to make the information accessible (at least, as accessible as it can be) to a much larger audience.
But the numbers they list are meaningless. Why in Dallas alone, there are many different electricity providers with significantly different rates largely depending on if you have a contract and for how long. Then I know of people in other parts of the country that pay a fraction of what I pay while others probably pay more. Without knowing otherwise, I’m going to assume these electric car companies are going with the best numbers they can find to make the ratings sound good. That says nothing of what my experience would be.
CNG doesn’t have quite as much variance, but it’s still pretty bad. I don’t know how much the price of natural gas varies across the country but gasoline varies significantly by location and even more so by time. They could be going by the cheapest natural gas in the country and the most expensive premium unleaded gasoline in the country. That says little for how it’s going to work for me.
I understand that people may not want to have to calculate the equivalence themselves, but the fact is they’re going to have to if they really want accurate numbers. By listing “equivalent gasoline mpg”, they’re just obscuring this fact and making it harder to calculate it for ourselves.
Do they say what price for gasoline, electricity and CNG they’re assuming?
Not on the page I was looking at.