this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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So they do a series of very precise, complicated drive cycles (with a few different options of which cycles and fuzzy math multipliers) to estimate a number that people will never reach because they're doing 80mph. But somehow to anti-ev people it's only electric range that is an unforgivable lie, not ambitious MPG ratings. It seems like a disadvantage to use a different rating system but I guess you can't trust the gen pop to understand MPkW since they can't picture a bottle of 1kW
So this value should only be used as a horizontal comparison metric (i.e. one car to another) and a rough estimate of overall range, just like listed MPG has always been.
Right, so you could have highway range and city range
Honestly it's not even a rough estimate. ICE cars only convert something like 20% of the energy to actual power at the wheel. That means, in practice, range is mostly just about how much time you're behind the wheel. It would make more sense to estimate ICE range in hours than miles.
EVs are more efficient, so in practice, particularly on long trips at high speed, range will vary dramatically depending on what's going on aerodynamically, which changes dramatically from one second to the next.
And it's like a bottle of battery volume if you like to think of it that way.
I suspect most people wouldn't really know how big a gallon is either. They care about how much they pay per gallon, and they just don't know that their electricity bill tells them how much they pay per kWh.
Americans often buy milk by the gallon and have various 1-5 gallon gas cans for common gas powered equipment (lawn mower, leaf blower, generator). I beleive a gallon is tangible here. I'm sure ~4 liters is tangible for metric countries although they often use l/100 miles so they just need to know 1 liter, which I assume many drinks are sold as such