This month Ford proudly revealed that the new 2012 Ford Focus Electric will be the first all-electric five-seat vehicle to achieve a fuel efficiency rating of 100 MPGe.
This sneaks it just ahead of Nissan LEAF, with a 99 MPGe rating, but a fair shot below the four-seat Mitsubishi i-MiEV, with its 112 MPGe rating.
The Chevrolet Volt, whose gas engine is ostensibly just for charging its electric motor, has a rating of 60 MPGe (a figure that includes both gas and electric energy use).
All these figures are combined city/highway figures (weighted 55% city, 45% highway). This is all well and good, but you might be asking, “What exactly is MPGe?”
It is the brainchild of the US-based Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has been testing vehicles under its own set of test protocols for decades, to arrive at comparative fuel economy ratings for new vehicles — the fuel economy numbers Americans see on the window stickers of new vehicles.
When electric vehicles fist started showing up, the EPA had to think about which “metric” to use to describe the comparative electrical energy use of the respective EV models. It did a study and found US consumers really, really like MPG and really, really don't want to move to another “metric.”
And they certainly didn’t want to use anything with kilowatt-hours of electricity (kWh), the unit of electric measurement used on our home electrical bills. The overwhelming sentiment relayed by surveyed consumers was, “Keep it simple and present it in a way that is familiar.”
The study even noted that focus group participants favoured MPGe for electric vehicles “in spite of the fact that they did not understand, nor did they feel the need to understand, how an MPGe metric was calculated. This again suggests that the desire for simplicity and familiarity outweighs the desire for accurate information.”
This sneaks it just ahead of Nissan LEAF, with a 99 MPGe rating, but a fair shot below the four-seat Mitsubishi i-MiEV, with its 112 MPGe rating.
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| Mitsubishi i-MiEV (Photo: Lesley Wimbush/Auto123.com) |
The Chevrolet Volt, whose gas engine is ostensibly just for charging its electric motor, has a rating of 60 MPGe (a figure that includes both gas and electric energy use).
All these figures are combined city/highway figures (weighted 55% city, 45% highway). This is all well and good, but you might be asking, “What exactly is MPGe?”
It is the brainchild of the US-based Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA has been testing vehicles under its own set of test protocols for decades, to arrive at comparative fuel economy ratings for new vehicles — the fuel economy numbers Americans see on the window stickers of new vehicles.
When electric vehicles fist started showing up, the EPA had to think about which “metric” to use to describe the comparative electrical energy use of the respective EV models. It did a study and found US consumers really, really like MPG and really, really don't want to move to another “metric.”
And they certainly didn’t want to use anything with kilowatt-hours of electricity (kWh), the unit of electric measurement used on our home electrical bills. The overwhelming sentiment relayed by surveyed consumers was, “Keep it simple and present it in a way that is familiar.”
The study even noted that focus group participants favoured MPGe for electric vehicles “in spite of the fact that they did not understand, nor did they feel the need to understand, how an MPGe metric was calculated. This again suggests that the desire for simplicity and familiarity outweighs the desire for accurate information.”
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| 2012 Chevrolet Volt (Photo: Lesley Wimbush/Auto123.com) |