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Comment by timcederman | Hacker News Reader

MPG for electric cars - all explained here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miles_per_gallon_gasoline_equiv.... Basically you convert everything to equivalent energy to do the comparison.

I leased a Nissan Leaf a couple of weeks ago as a commuter vehicle. I only did it because of the price, which was amazingly low, combined with the benefits of no gas, carpool lane access, and no emissions. What has surprised me is how much I like it as a car. It's rather cheap and cheerful materials, but it's thoughtfully designed, and drives great. Given the Federal rebate in the US, and the extra ones you get in California and other states, I highly recommend it. (particularly somewhere like the Bay Area, where there are charging stations everywhere)

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That page is pretty funny:

"... research showed that participants did not understand the concept of a kilowatt hour as a measure of electric energy use despite the use of this unit in their monthly electric bills. Instead, participants favored a miles per gallon equivalent, MPGe, as the metric to compare with the familiar miles per gallon used for gasoline vehicles. The research also concluded that the kW-hrs per 100 miles metric was more confusing to focus group participants compared to a miles per kW-hr."

The fact that people find inverse consumption less confusing than consumption seems to indicate the they never actually do any calculations based on that number...

The problem with MPGe is that, while it makes for a nice number to compare to ICE vehicles, it entangles things like the average national efficiency of power plants with the energy consumption of the car, so it's impossible to calculate e.g. how much it will cost me to drive to work every day or how large a PV setup I need to supply my commuting energy need.

Oh yes, the classic "people won't understand that so let's go with the bad solution".

It would be nice to normalize everything to "price per mile". Shouldn't be too hard to come up with reasonable numbers for each state.

Would would a Leaf get access to the carpool lane while not carpooling?

California lets an unlimited number of electric vehicles get HOV stickers to allow access at all times.

Not in WA.

Not yet, but there is a bill pending in the legislature.

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