I don't think this is an impossible task. It may not be as simple as getting down to a single number that you can put on a window sticker, but there's solutions.

Here's how I'd test serial hybrids like the Volt. Fully charge the batteries and run the car continuously on the EPA's city cycle, count how many miles until the gas engine kicks on. Do the same for the highway cycle.

Then once the batteries are depleted, run the car on the normal city and highway cycles and measure the exact fuel consumed, just like testing a regular car.

So you'd end up with a window sticker that might look something like this:

Electric only: 45/40 miles range (city/highway)
Hybrid operation: 55/48 miles per gallon (city highway)

To me, that's what I want to know. How far I can drive on batteries only, and then what kind of mileage I'll get once the batteries are depleted.

That will encourage the automakers to give their cars a decent battery capacity, and then also design an efficient IC engine charging strategy.

 

This seems like a very reasonable idea to me, why don't they just do that?

 

You mean that the electricity to power my new green electric car doesn't come from pixie dust and the cuteness of little baby seals. I feel betrayed.....

 

Yeah. What I was saying was sort of tongue-in-cheek. I think most of the power generation for Houston is from natural gas. At any rate, the efficiency of the power plant is going to be a lot higher than the little ICE even with transmission losses I imagine. If you were in an area with "clean" or "renewable" energy sources it would be better... coal fired plants, maybe not so much.

 

I got that from your previous post. I was just taking a shot at the hippies that assume an electric car will solve all of the energy issues.

 

That's all well and good from a consumer point of view. I like it.

The problem with it is that they'd have to rewrite all of the laws and regulations to accommodate that. For example, how does that work with the CAFE requirement of 35mpg average? You've got two numbers to work in there.

It'd be a lot less re-writing of existing policy (which is plenty complicated enough, IMO) to come up with a way to work both figures into a single numeric rating.

 

^ with, cafe being fuel efficency, it would have its own number for fuel consumption only. ie, 55- 45 = 10.

you would have to rewrite the rules and laws. the only logical way to do that would be to base CAFE ratings on distance traveled and how much the fuel cost is. <- but fuel cost is never standard.

so either mess with alot of stupid junk, get rid of CAFE, or just make special rules for electric vehicles.

 

I think you're on the right track here, but it should be based on fuel quantity, not cost. IMO, the rating should be something along the lines of the energy consumed to traverse some standard course. Gas vehicles would be rated in terms of gallons consumed, pure-electric vehicles would be rated in terms of kilojoules consumed, and hybrids would be rated on both. The course would be long enough that no hybrid could reasonably traverse the course without using both electricity and gasoline (say, 500 miles -- with the understanding that this distance could be increased in the future as necessary to continue providing meaningful ratings).

CAFE would have a standard conversion rate to convert one energy unit to the other. The conversion would be based on the actual average amount of fossil fuels used to generate electricity by the U.S. infrastructure, recalculated periodically. Nuclear, hydro, solar, and wind plants would pull that value down, which would in turn give people (especially the auto industry) incentive to invest in clean power.

Using the conversion rate, CAFE would standardize all vehicle ratings to one or the other, and the CAFE targets/limits would be converted to the new system.

At least, that's how I think it should work.