Many EVs outperform EPA estimates in this real-world efficiency testing
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Interesting read, but how do you run a comparison test with so many vehicles, with the goal of finding the most efficient car, and not include the largest selling, and possibly most efficient electric cars out there?
It's not like it's hard to find someone with a Tesla.
But it sounds like this is automaker supplied vehicles, and as Tesla doesn't have a public facing marketing department, they wouldn't have sent a car.
It's not like it's hard to find someone with a Tesla.
But it sounds like this is automaker supplied vehicles, and as Tesla doesn't have a public facing marketing department, they wouldn't have sent a car.
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ColdWetDog
Ars Legatus Legionis
I guess the Prius doesn't get it's own picture. Now, that might have made sense with the classic Prius styling which is known to scare small children, but the new one is supposed to look pretty cool.
And no Telsa in an article designed around EPA vs. real world mismatch? I am disappoint. (Although this was probably due more to the Tesla company than anything else.)
(But as GreenEnvy points out, they probably could have just hijacked a Tesla on the road. Somebody would have gone along with the concept.)
And no Telsa in an article designed around EPA vs. real world mismatch? I am disappoint. (Although this was probably due more to the Tesla company than anything else.)
(But as GreenEnvy points out, they probably could have just hijacked a Tesla on the road. Somebody would have gone along with the concept.)
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I read the whole article but spent most of it hung up on the comment that none of the PHEVs were charged as a matter of fairness and to simulate long road trips.
I guess I can understand the long road trip part - if I’m in the middle of a long drive, I’d just gas and go. But, I’d also make sure that at the start of my trip (and at the start of each morning) I was fully charged and gassed - I’m not sure how forgoing that boosts fairness. On the surface, it seems to be the exact opposite.
I guess I can understand the long road trip part - if I’m in the middle of a long drive, I’d just gas and go. But, I’d also make sure that at the start of my trip (and at the start of each morning) I was fully charged and gassed - I’m not sure how forgoing that boosts fairness. On the surface, it seems to be the exact opposite.
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Wow I didn't realse just how much heavier those "mini" SUVs and/or how litle of a difference the hybrid makes. Barely matching them getting ~7L/100km in my 5 year old 1.6L turbo petrol i30 driving around the suburbs!
PS. would a leaderboard/table at the end have been too sporting?
PS. would a leaderboard/table at the end have been too sporting?
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We have a ’not available in the US’ VW Golf GTE - it has a 150hp 1.4ltr Turbo and a ~100hp electric motor that combine for something over 200hp (You go not get full e-motor + ICE)
We only use it for longer trips - a recent, fairly rapid ‘Yorkshire and back’ round trip of ~500 miles returned 59.7 UK MPG / 49.7 US MPG / 4.7 litres / 100km. We did start with a full battery, but also finished on 1/2 a battery too - so not a huge impact.
We also have a Fiat 500E that manages ~4.5 miles / kWh which is about 150eMPG (UK) or 125 eMPG (US) on its local not-so-local usage.
The Golf will be replaced by a Cupra Born next year……
We only use it for longer trips - a recent, fairly rapid ‘Yorkshire and back’ round trip of ~500 miles returned 59.7 UK MPG / 49.7 US MPG / 4.7 litres / 100km. We did start with a full battery, but also finished on 1/2 a battery too - so not a huge impact.
We also have a Fiat 500E that manages ~4.5 miles / kWh which is about 150eMPG (UK) or 125 eMPG (US) on its local not-so-local usage.
The Golf will be replaced by a Cupra Born next year……
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Now repeat the test in the middle of winter to see how much efficiency the pure EV's lose.
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Shame there weren't more plugin hybrids. From what I can see, mild hybrids tend to use the electric motor for more power most of the time, rather than improved efficiency.
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Fun write-up! This kind of real world testing is important.
In addition to the detailed efficiency stats, it would be nice to see a total cost and a $/mile metric. A table to facilitate easier comparison of the collected data would be useful and maybe help alleviate questions like relative noise level between the Ioniq 5 & 6.
Beyond the efficiency, maybe you can squeeze a second article that compares the driver experience of each car. There was some of those in the discussion of gauges, but why not choose some dimensions and subjectively review each car?
In addition to the detailed efficiency stats, it would be nice to see a total cost and a $/mile metric. A table to facilitate easier comparison of the collected data would be useful and maybe help alleviate questions like relative noise level between the Ioniq 5 & 6.
Beyond the efficiency, maybe you can squeeze a second article that compares the driver experience of each car. There was some of those in the discussion of gauges, but why not choose some dimensions and subjectively review each car?
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In my opinion what makes this far more of a pointless stunt than the choice of cars is doing a run in perfect summer weather. I can forgive the flat road and moderate highway speed as that may well be what range is most useful for, although particularly hybrids are mainly meant to decrease awful ICE efficiency in city traffic. But ignoring the fact that by far the most variation is in thermal management make it utterly useless. They have some of the worst offenders in their EV lineup with no heat scavenging from the powertrain, not even an optional heat pump and poor battery management that uses a resistive heater even when not heading to a charging station. But from the article you'd think they were amazing magic range machines.
That's why I also pretty much ignore every car launch that invites journalists on a test drive in Dubai in the middle of summer. They invariable show up in the last places of scandinavian tests six months later, after all the accolades have been handed out and the marketing blitz is over.
It would also be nice to get a proper battery test included for the EVs. Unfortunately, there is no standardization on the claimed usable capacity at all, with most manufacturers listing some form of gross capacity. Anywhere between 80% and 100% of that might actually be accessible. Then you have heat losses, while a modern car shouldn't really notice the difference between 90 and 120km/h, the Honda e somehow managed to lose 6% at higher speeds. Once you've nearly discharged it, you might find that some manufacturers leave a decent reserve below 0%, while others might suddenly die at 1%, and yet others can theoretically be driven to empty but are limited to a crawl under 10%. And to make matters worse, you can't just do a partial test and extrapolate because several manufacturers use distinctly nonlinear charge meters that drop faster in the lower half.
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Count this as another vote for "not charging the PHEVs is a bad decision."
Also, were there requirements that legs must be completed within a certain timeframe? If everyone is cruising along below the speed limit (for best efficiency), it tells us nothing about real world stats.
Also, were there requirements that legs must be completed within a certain timeframe? If everyone is cruising along below the speed limit (for best efficiency), it tells us nothing about real world stats.
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I have noticed that most adverts for cars do not show a price. Mainly it is
£xxxx deposit
£xx.xx per month
£xxxxxx final payment
Adding up to a tonne of money. Last car I bought (Mazda 3 2.2 diesel sport) 2017 cost £19,000 (ow was it £18,000)? To get an equivalent non ICE (or hybrid) I would be spending a lot more than £30k.
AS I Am retired now and the cost of a new car is just tooooo much!. I will b keeping my car for a long time....
£xxxx deposit
£xx.xx per month
£xxxxxx final payment
Adding up to a tonne of money. Last car I bought (Mazda 3 2.2 diesel sport) 2017 cost £19,000 (ow was it £18,000)? To get an equivalent non ICE (or hybrid) I would be spending a lot more than £30k.
AS I Am retired now and the cost of a new car is just tooooo much!. I will b keeping my car for a long time....
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Big fan of my own Accord Hybrid Touring that I've had a little over 2 months now. I noticed two things about it though that increased my range a little bit more:
1) It definitely noticeably went up after about a thousand miles or so, give or take a couple hundred. I went from consistently getting between 42-44 to between 47-50 and the weather and my commute have been all the same.
2) I use individual mode instead of Eco for driving. The only Eco setting I use in individual mode is Eco cruise control but everything else is set to normal. You can test by looking at the power gauge (this car doesn't have an RPM gauge) when driving at city speeds between Normal and Eco Mode in that for some reason, the car kicks the engine on a lot sooner into the power gauge when using Eco model than Normal mode. So I basically solved that issue by setting the Individual model to the above mentioned settings.
Other than those two things I noticed it's otherwise been a huge upgrade from my 10 year old Mazda3, but I do still dearly miss having a hatchback. It's a shame there's only a couple hatchbacks still for sale on the U.S. while anything else larger with a hatch is a crossover.
1) It definitely noticeably went up after about a thousand miles or so, give or take a couple hundred. I went from consistently getting between 42-44 to between 47-50 and the weather and my commute have been all the same.
2) I use individual mode instead of Eco for driving. The only Eco setting I use in individual mode is Eco cruise control but everything else is set to normal. You can test by looking at the power gauge (this car doesn't have an RPM gauge) when driving at city speeds between Normal and Eco Mode in that for some reason, the car kicks the engine on a lot sooner into the power gauge when using Eco model than Normal mode. So I basically solved that issue by setting the Individual model to the above mentioned settings.
Other than those two things I noticed it's otherwise been a huge upgrade from my 10 year old Mazda3, but I do still dearly miss having a hatchback. It's a shame there's only a couple hatchbacks still for sale on the U.S. while anything else larger with a hatch is a crossover.
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MIT has a pretty good web app for this called carbon counter. Check it out, it shows how BEV are almost always better, but PHEV are very close behind. Hybrids fair quite well in general if the car is small.
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Since I'm not the only reader who wanted a comparison table ... I've slapped together this first-cut. It's based purely on the information in the article, so there are empty cells where the individual vehicle wasn't full described nor the body type apparent from the photo. (Body type may not be a useful attribute: it's intended as a proxy for weight class, and might correlate with MPG, but can't be fully analyzed without engine type and battery size.) The table is in the article's order; I have not sorted by make or MPG.
Edit 1: By request (thank you for the feedback, fellow commenters): Added EPA MPG estimate, percent difference between EPA and EcoRun (positive is better), sorted by EcoRun MPG, added "article order" to align to prose if you choose, deleted "model year" (they're all 2023 or similarly recent, I guess?).
Edit 1: By request (thank you for the feedback, fellow commenters): Added EPA MPG estimate, percent difference between EPA and EcoRun (positive is better), sorted by EcoRun MPG, added "article order" to align to prose if you choose, deleted "model year" (they're all 2023 or similarly recent, I guess?).
| Make | Model | Style | Drivetrain | Engine(s) | EPA | EcoRun | Diff | Article |
| Kia | Niro EV | BEV | 113 | 156.0 | +38% | 17 | ||
| Hyundai | Ioniq 6 | sedan | BEV | 103 | 129.0 | +25% | 13 | |
| Hyundai | Ioniq 5 | sedan | BEV | 98 | 122.0 | +24% | 14 | |
| Lexus | RZ 450e | sedan | BEV | 102 | 120.5 | +18% | 10 | |
| Genesis Electrified | GV70 | BEV | 91 | 120.0 | +32% | 16 | ||
| Mercedes-Benz | EQE 500 4Matic | sedan | BEV | 94 | 119.0 | +27% | 15 | |
| Polestar | 2 | sedan | BEV | dual motor | 100 | 108.2 | +8% | 8 |
| Toyota | Mirai | sedan | fuel cell | 74 | 74.7 | +1% | 3 | |
| Kia | Niro PHEV | crossover | hybrid | 1.6L + electric, 180 hp and 265 Nm | 49 | 54.5 | +11% | 9 |
| Toyota | Corolla Hybrid AWD | sedan | hybrid | 1.8L + electric | 48 | 50.7 | +6% | 6 |
| Toyota | Prius Prime | hybrid | 2.0L, 220 hp | 52 | 48.1 | - 8% | 1 | |
| Honda | Accord Hybrid | sedan | hybrid | FWD 335 Nm | 44 | 44.7 | +2% | 4 |
| Honda | CR-V | SUV | hybrid | 37 | 38.5 | +4% | 5 | |
| Hyundai | Tucson | SUV | hybrid | 1.6L turbo + 59 hp electric, 226 hp and 350 Nm | 37 | 34.5 | - 7% | 2 |
| Mazda | CX-90 | hybrid | 25 | 30.0 | +20% | 12 | ||
| Lexus | RX 500h | hatchback | hybrid | 2.4L turbo, 376 hp | 27 | 28.6 | +6% | 7 |
| Jeep | Wrangler Unlimited 4xe | hybrid | 20 | 28.2 | +41% | 18 | ||
| Range Rover | P440e | hybrid | 21 | 25.1 | +20% | 11 |
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Quite. Bit perplexing not to have any Teslas here, especially given articles like this that have appeared in the (virtual) pages of this very publication. If the claim is true, this would have been trivially easy to check in a ”real-world” test like this. If not, you’d have broken news.
As an owner of a very, very early Model 3, I personally have noticed that while I can almost always outperform the guess-o-meter on shorter trips by at least 3-4 percent, even at highway speeds, but on anything longer than about 72-75mi, I usually underperform by about 6-8 percent, even if I’m not doing anything different behaviorally. I also saw significant battery degradation in my first year of ownership, much above what others were quoting as normal, with significantly less driving. I drove 10,001 mi in the first 365 days of ownership and saw capacity drop by about 12 percent, before slowly recovering about 1 percent over the course of the next three months. With just 33k mi on it now, it has about 84 percent of rated capacity.
But for many reasons, the next car will not be a Tesla. I’m really hoping that VW actually does launch that bus soon.
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Assuming the test exceeded the range of a typical PHEV battery, PHEV ratings if charged would be entirely dependent on the distance of the test. The longer the test, the closer the measure would be to their gas efficiency. The shorter, the closer it would be to their EV efficiency. You'd have "mpge = PercentICE*ICEEffiency + (1-PercentICE)*EVEfficiency and be trying to cram PercentICE, ICEEfficiency, and EVEfficiency into a single output number.
Note: I'm assuming they'd keep their "single mpg[e] to represent performance" approach. If they added more parameters like "the gas engine turned on at 75km, and then it did 50mpg", then that'd be fine. But I'm guessing they didn't want to.
Starting uncharged, at least the measured result would tell you something fairly accurate about the gas efficiency rather than "the gas efficiency is lower than this number and EV efficiency is higher than this number".
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Any chance you could add a column showing percent rated MPG/MPGe? That would make it perfect.
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Much like a pig, science is still incapable of preventing a Wrangler from rolling over.
Only car I’ve ever driven that actively tried to kill me.
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Careful, too much horn-blowing will deplete the battery and cut into your driving range.
Also, please consider presenting the results in a table.
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It's probably less about the technology, and more about how it was driven. This is an efficiency contest after all.
From the official figures, when burning gas, the PHEV Jeep gets worse gas mileage than the non PHEV.
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I’m sure the journalists had fun, but I tend to agree with other comments that there are quite a few factors here that make these results useless for people who might want to purchase an efficient vehicle. The results are misleading, to say the least.
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I get your point about trying to measure something, and picking the ICE efficiency at the one you're more interested in.
But on the other hand the battery isn't removed, and still has an effect on the range. In this test, a larger battery does nothing but penalize the numbers, since it is a larger useless lump to be carried around. That's not true in real-world usage, though. In real world, the larger battery will give a massive benefit prior to becoming drained and the benefit will far, far outweigh the post-drained ICE efficiency penalty.
There's no pretending the battery isn't there. You might as well use it as designed. Which, for city driving, means it provides all your energy. Want to know how it does on a road trip? Take it on one.
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I got my EV in February, and summer driving is MAYBE a couple extra tenths of a mile per kilowatt better than winter levels. From watching the battery stats, in the cold the mileage starts noticeably low, but within ten minutes goes up to normal levels. In other words, the same thing as gas cars, so it's completely irrelevant.
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They wouldn't have sent a car anyway. They're in the middle of a lawsuit over having misrepresented the range of their vehicles. The last thing they want is more evidence against them.
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For next year: Have all the BEVs start with an empty battery. They can't start until they charge. Score on both efficiency and charging time.
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The sole representative being Jeep, of all makers. Yes, I know, Jeep is technically part of Stellantis, which is owned by PSA. But they've largely left it as an American thing, so it still mostly counts.
Anyway...your comment made me think again about how unfortunate it is that Ford stopped making my car (cars altogether, really, but for purposes of this discussion...), the Ford Fusion Hybrid. Mine is a 2015 model with 130k miles, and over the entire lifetime of the vehicle, I am averaging 39.9 MPG. That's pretty fucking awesome, IMO, and it would be great to see what they could have done with the model had they continued making and evolving it.
Also really liked the bit about the Accord's drive system foregoing the transmission. That sounds really cool and innovative, and the mileage numbers for that vehicle are impressive.
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I have to say, this really highlighted how bad the SUV craze has been for wallets and the environment. I was not expecting so many hybrids to have worse mileage or barely beat the car we bought 20 years ago. It's better than an ICE drivetrain, of course, but that's like 4 decades of efficiency improvements cancelled out for aesthetic reasons.
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I think that’s what surprises me most about the results. The numbers don’t feel impressive or substantial. They are especially worrisome for the SUV type vehicles.
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Also most miles are commute, not roadtrip,
So phev is done a little dirty here.
Phev’s can be driven fully electric 80% of the time ( mine is)
Which is actually a great way to have more electric cars in the road as for every model 3 you could build 4 chevy volts.
Also curious is the efficiency of the Niro.
Its a boxy suv but it beats out the slippery hyundai ioniq6??
How???
What voodoo is this?
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