Yesterday I was in back of a Tesla with a vanity license, "103 MPG". I googled it up and found there is a Tesla costing about $150,000 touting 103 mpg.
This got me scratching my head wondering how an all battery operated car which uses no gasoline can be considered to get 103 mpg.
Wondered what guys here might think?
Pretty convoluted since there are only virtual gallons involved but...
That is pretty convoluted and apparently makes electric cars look better. What might make more sense to us consumers is cost per mile for fuel no matter what it is. It still might tend to favor electric as fuel is taxed less. Ratio of fuel cost to electricity cost wildly varies throughout regions of course. If you are driving an electric car that costs more than 5 times as much as my Forester and brag about the savings, maybe you should consider the cost of the car in the cost per mile. I roughly estimated that it would cost $10,000 in gasoline to get
100,000 miles out of my Forester. Lot cheaper overall than buying that Tesla.
The electric car fan boys never do seem to say anything about where all the extra electricity to charge them up is going to come from. The Energizer Bunny or the Duracell Fairy maybe?
Hey boy, gimme a few more coal-fired generation plants or maybe the one they really hate- nuclear power plants ;-)
The biggest expense in driving our cars (2005 Impreza WRX and 2007 Forester) is insurance. We've had some major hail storms in the area over the past few years and everybody's insurance goes up after a disaster whether they have made a claim or not.
The cost of my WRX is currently $.55 per mile including all expenses such as depreciation and insurance; I haven't kept CPM records on my wife's Forester
I think it's probably the mileage they get out of an equivalent amount of Joules of energy, whether gasoline Joules or electric Joules.
Yousuf Khan
Even if they go with hydrogen fuel cells, they are going to need electrolysis to split water up into hydrogen and oxygen, and then those will be used inside the fuel cell to go back to water again. That process will use up more energy to electrolyze than they get back when recombining. However, even if they use fossil fuels to power the power plants that run the electrolysis stage, it might be net more fuel efficient to burn the fuel inside a power plant than to burn the fossil fuel inside each individual vehicle. Thermodynamics makes getting 100% energy efficiency impossible.
There are also other fuel cell technologies that can work, such as alcohol fuel cells, and they are even working on gasoline and diesel fuel cells. Fuel cells are typically 60% efficient, vs. ICE at 20% efficiency. So even if you still keep using gasoline or diesel inside a fuel cell, you should get much greater mileage out of the fuel cell rather than the ICE.
Yousuf Khan
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