Controversy over the Chevy Volt’s MPG rating

The Volt completed the EPA fuel efficiency course, and got a lower rating than GM wanted – below 50MPG. However, this completely misses the point of the range-extended electric vehicle, which is to provide a first set of miles on cheaper electricity, then switch to gas as needed. So what to do? How do we classify the vehicle? More importantly, how do you let consumers know how it works and compare this and other future RE-EVs.

The 48MPG rating isn’t accurate by any means. The first and most obvious way would be to give it a different fuel economy area of the window sticker. This would signal to the buyer that this is not a normal car and that it has characteristics that no other car has had before.

Next would be to segment the fuel economy into two separate portions. First is the fuel economy based on the battery alone. The information provided would be the standard city/highway/combined values that people are accustom to, but would be the electric only range value. Also, an “estimated cost to charge” value which would take the national average energy price and the amount of energy needed to fully charge the battery (this would include any charging efficiency – usually 85% meter to battery).

The second portion of the sticker would be the typical MPG rating that would tell the buyer what kind of fuel efficiency they would expect after the battery has used up its charge. In other words, the distance traveled on battery power alone divided by how much fuel does it take to fill the battery up after its been tapped out (this assumes however, that the battery can accept all the power generated by the engine, if not, then the methodology would need to be adjusted).

Finally, near the bottom, we should have something to allow folks to easily compare between different RE-EVs. This would probably take the form of an amount of miles followed by an estimated cost (at a fixed rate between all stickers for a given year). This way, a vehicle with longer range but lower MPG could be compared against a vehicle with a lower range and higher MPG.

So what would the sticker look like? I figure something like this…

Volt Fuel Economy Sticker

Maybe its because I’m more analytical that I would want a range table at the bottom, and there might be a better way to convey that information to the consumer (a graph? I dunno). But for now this will have to do.

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