Owners of electric vehicles do not drive as much as other car owners, a new one study from the University of Chicago, University of California, Davis and UC Berkeley post. In fact, the average owner of the electric vehicle did not meet the expected values too much anywhere along the way, both in terms of mileage and in terms of things like household energy consumption.
I will present some of the great discoveries here, but the first thing to note is that this study has not was evaluated by colleagues. In principle, this only means that a few other researchers did not go over the findings to confirm them, but do not ignore them immediately. We will probably see changes in the future.
Now on the goods!
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) conducted this study, not on the basis of meters or personal reports, but on calculations that analyze the increase in energy consumption for homes for homes with electric vehicles in California. It has been a way of regulating information, as most electric vehicle manufacturers do not want to share mileage information and cannot always rely on drivers to provide accurate information.
Instead, the researchers analyzed a sample of residential electricity meters in California and compared meter readings with EV recordings. Out of 362,945 households analyzed, 57,290 electric vehicles hosted. The aim was to analyze how much electricity was used to charge electric vehicles, at which point the researchers extrapolated how many miles these electric vehicle owners drove. They were able to do this using information from the California Air Resources Board which estimates that 85% of electric vehicle charging takes place at home.
The bottom line is that “electric vehicles travel 5,300 miles a year, below half the US fleet average.”
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Of course, we do not receive all the data here. Electric vehicle owners may charge more frequently outside the home than inside. The researchers worked with a fairly small sample size and used data from 2014-2017, when there were fewer electric vehicles on the road than now. It is quite possible that things will be drastically different now.
The study was launched to encourage further discussions and studies; it is more of a starting point than a conclusive piece of research designed to raise “important questions about the potential of technology to replace the vast majority of journeys that currently use petrol”.