Electric vehicle owners don’t drive as much as other auto owners, a new study from the University of Chicago, University of California, Davis and UC Berkeley postits. In fact, the average EV owner has not yet met the expected metrics anywhere along the road, both in terms of mileage and in terms of things like the use of domestic energy.
I will present some of the great discoveries here, but the first thing to note is that this study has no has been peer reviewed. Basically, this just means that several other researchers have not examined the findings to confirm them, but do not dismiss them immediately. We will probably see changes in the future.
Now for the merchandise!
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) conducted this study, not on the basis of pedometers or personal reports, but on calculations that observe the increase in energy use in homes with EVs in California. It was a way of regulating information, since most EV manufacturers do not want to share mileage information and drivers cannot always be trusted to provide accurate information.
Instead, the researchers analyzed a sample of residential electricity meters in California and compared the meter readings with the EV records. Of 362,945 families analyzed, 57,290 hosted EVs. The goal was to see how much extra electricity was used to charge EVs, from which the researchers extrapolated on how many kilometers these EV owners were driving. They were able to do this using information from the California Air Resources Board, which estimates that 85 percent of the EV load occurs at home.
The bottom line is that “EVs travel 5300 miles a year, less than half the average for the US fleet”.
G / O Media can receive a commission
Of course, we are not getting all the data here. EV owners can charge more often outside the home than inside. The researchers were working with a very small sample size and using data from 2014-2017, when there were fewer EVs on the road than now. It is entirely possible that things are drastically different now.
The study was launched to encourage further discussion and studies; it is more of a starting point than conclusive research, designed to raise “important questions about the potential of technology to replace the vast majority of trips that currently use gasoline”.