Owners of electric vehicles do not drive as much as other cars, a new car study of the University of Chicago, University of California, Davis and UC Berkeley. In fact, the average EV owner did not quite meet the expected statistics everywhere along the road, both in terms of mileage and in terms of things like household energy consumption.
I will guide you through some great findings here, but the first thing to note is that this study was done not peer review. This basically means that several other researchers did not go through the findings to confirm it, but that does not immediately diminish them. We will probably see changes in the future.
Now, on to the goods!
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) conducted this study, not based on odometers or personal reporting, but on calculations looking at the increase in household energy consumption for homes with EVs in California. This was a way to regulate information, as most car manufacturers do not want to share mileage information and drivers cannot always be relied upon to provide accurate information.
Instead, the researchers looked at an example of residential electricity meters in California and compared meter readings with EV registration records. Out of 362,945 analyzed households, 57,290 EVs were presented. The goal was to look at how much extra electricity was used to charge EVs, after which researchers extrapolated how many miles these EV owners drove. They were able to do this using information from the California Air Resources Board which estimates that 85 percent of the EV levy occurs at home.
The ultimate conclusion is that “EVs travel 5,300 kilometers a year, below half the average of the U.S. Navy.”
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Of course, we do not get all the data here. EV owners can charge more frequently outside the home than inside. The researchers work with a fairly small sample size and use data from 2014-2017, when there were fewer EVs on the road than there are now. It is quite possible that things are drastically different now.
The study was released to stimulate discussion and further study; it is more of a starting point than it is a crucial research, aimed at “raising important questions about the potential for technology to replace the vast majority of travel with petrol.”