Electric vehicle owners don’t drive as much as other vehicle owners, a novelty to study from the University of Chicago, the University of California, Davis and UC Berkeley. In fact, the average electric vehicle owner has not met the expected metrics wherever along the road, both in terms of mileage and in terms of domestic energy consumption.
I’ll tell you about some of the great findings here, but the first thing to keep in mind is that you have this study no has been peer reviewed. Basically, this means that several researchers have not reviewed the results to confirm them, but they do not discount them immediately. We will probably see changes in the future.
Now, to the merchandise!
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) conducted this study, not based on mileage or personal reporting, but on calculations that analyze the increase in energy use. of homes in homes with electric vehicles in California. It was a way to regulate information, as most electric vehicle manufacturers don’t want to share mileage information and drivers can’t always be trusted to provide accurate information.
In contrast, the researchers examined a sample of residential electricity meters in California and compared meter readings with EV log records. Of the 362,945 households analyzed, 57,290 housed electric vehicles. The purpose was to examine the amount of additional electricity used to charge electric vehicles, at which point researchers extrapolated how many miles these electric vehicle owners drove. They were able to do this through information from the California Air Resources Board which estimates that 85% of electric vehicle charging occurs at home.
The bottom line is that “electric vehicles travel 5,300 miles a year, below half the average of the U.S. fleet.”
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Of course, we don’t get all the data here. Electric vehicle owners could charge more often outside the home than inside it. 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 there are now. It’s entirely possible that things are drastically different now.
The study was published to encourage discussion and further study; it is a starting point rather than a conclusive research, designed to raise “important questions about the potential of technology to replace the vast majority of trips that currently use gasoline.”