“No, I like gas cars.”

I tell everyone I can about this car. I’ve found it best to just say I’m getting 135 mpg and climbing. If someone is thinking in gasoline terms there’s enough of a shock factor there to gather their interest. My previous car was a 4 cyl. Mazda 6 averaging 30 mpg in the same SoCal commute and my Clarity is far cheaper to operate. I can understand the hesitation due to lower cost gasoline but in California at near $4/gallon the SUV craze blows my mind.

 

WAIT! Electric cars run on coal? No WONDER they pollute so much more than real cars!

 

The mindset expressed in the title of this thread is best described as “Status Quo Bias”.

Anyone can google it, but this sums it up...

 

That is even more infuriating than going to a self service gas station. First, it takes at least twice as long, sometimes much more time than that. Second, the guy pumping gas is extremely likely to overfill because they always try to make the amount round. Third, they are typically not careful not to spill fuel on your paintwork and/or not tighten your gas cap enough to avoid a check engine light. Whenever I have to get gas in NJ, I attempt to do it myself if I can. I will at least finish the process.


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I called my local power company asking for some info about rebates and such. The lady asked me what I drive, I told her a Honda Clarity. She'd never heard of it but seemed very interested. She had to write down the name of the car so she wouldn't forget. We chatted about the car and its features for 10 minutes.

 

There are a few surprises in some states. In Oklahoma, almost dead center in petroleum production, 33% of the electric grid is powered by wind. A large percentage of the other 66% is from natural gas.

 

Natural gas is not dirty. As of 2017 it was actually the single biggest source of reduction in emissions in the US (replacement of coal with it).

 

If you are interested: https://www.insideevsforum.com/community/index.php?threads/environmental-aspects-of-clarity-phev.3511/#post-33985

The post at the top of the thread has some of the details. Here is the main takeaway...



Note - grey color states is where there is not much difference in CO2 emissions from gas powered cars vs grid powered cars. Nova Scotia is pink because they are close to transitioning from (mainly) coal to mainly hydroelectric power via a new power link to NFLD. This is a very basic picture, but there is a lot of details that are considered; the specific location within a state may have electricity supplied through a different grid sub-region which has a different emissions profile from the rest of the state.

Update - Oklahoma will potentially be green now on this map, given the current data. Possibly a few others have passed into grey or green as more plants switch from coal to natural gas and more renewables.

 

This chart seems to provide 'Absolute proof that EVs DO NOT pollute less no matter what their source of electricity' (combining two threads).

I also question having New York in green: When I am getting about 65% of rated miles per KWH due to cabin heater requirements in winter. (30 EV range vs 47 rated). This extra use of electricity would generate more CO2 per mile, but is probably not accounted in the map: Seems like other northern areas should also experience this penalty.

 

I may contribute more to that thread. I am hesitant though.

A few asterisks to keep in mind is that the grid in many states is changing quickly (some would say it is glacial change, but in other perspectives it is rapid). So this outcome was true from data published 1.5 years ago. But keep in mind that LCA's often take into account the data that exists and may not account for how the grid emissions may clean up over the life of the car. Or the person may move from a coal intense place to a hydroelectric place.

If one wanted to spin it to favor BEVs and PHEVs, one way to do that is to average the entire US grid and sleep well at night. If one wants to fight EVs they can point to the coal-rich regions and run the numbers in the worst-case to support their argument.

Like anything, there are shades of grey and context to be taken into account, and what is true today may be false next week.

As to your question on cold states like NY with lower EV range in the winter, that is certainly the case. In my post at the top of that thread I accounted for +20/-20% EPA estimates for the efficiency, which covers some of that, but you'd probably have to extrapolate more to account for more significant differences. But I haven't seen anyone quantify how mileage estimates change for HEV/ICE cars under the same frigid use conditions.

 

Last spring I was invited to participate as a presenter in a public forum on PHEVs. Other folks on the “stage” with me answering audience questions were a Volt owner, a Fusion Energi owner and an i3REX owner. Even though the audience were folks interested enough to attend to begin with, there were lots of very basic questions about charging, gas use, maintenance, and driver interaction with the car. In the mini “car show” of the 4 vehicles that followed the forum, IMHO the Clarity was liked the most overall because of the available space, interior design, and combination electric/gas range. There were potential buyers very disappointed the Clarity was not stocked in Michigan.

Then, in October I participated in the National Solar Home Tour with an open house at my home. Among other things, I highlighted the Clarity sitting in my garage as charging off one of my solar systems. Once again, the interest in a car that could run off the sun and also had a gas engine was strong, but pretty much ended when folks found out it could not be test driven and evaluated at any dealer in Michigan. (I even wore the Clarity T-shirt Insightman sent me.)

In both the forum and the open house I told everyone to hang on until 2020, when many new electrified vehicles will be hitting the market. I just hope they won’t all go to ZEV states.

 

It seems that you missed my subtle use of sarcasm... I was responding to the fact that the quoted comment was about overreaction to misinformation/ignorance.

 

That's very gracious of you. If you go back to your initial posting you'll recall that it mentions several such overreactions. Coutinpe's comment was about THAT posting so, in fact, my comment was a reaction to the two - I could not determine how to quote two different messages in one comment so elected to quote only the most recent. My brain works like that - it gathers information, looks for connections and then responds to those connected bits: It is not good at processing all information as discrete bits of unrelated data. Now, as to why you'd assume I had enough expertise to lecture on PHEV misunderstanding I don't know - but my own experience has more than proven, to me, that many people are unaware of the features of PHEVs. I've dealt first-hand with misinformed and/or uninformed dealerships and fielded many questions from people in public and at the two National Drive Electric Week events I attended earlier this year. My personal take is that the dealership industry and the general public have not been provided with significant information via advertising, nor have they been exposed to PHEVs in great enough numbers to pique their curiosity. For example: Despite my Clarity clearly broadcasting its AVAS sound effect, people often step in front of my moving Clarity in parking lots because they not only don't hear the sound of an ICE vehicle, they don't know how to interpret the sound that the Clarity DOES produce.