Electric vehicle owners drive less than other car owners, a new one study from the University of Chicago, University of California, Davis and UC Berkeley. In fact, the average EV owner has not quite met the expected metrics everywhere along the road, both in kilometers and in matters such as household energy consumption.
I’m going to go through some of the big findings here, but the first thing to note is that this study does not have been peer-reviewed. Basically, that just means that several other researchers haven’t gone through the findings to confirm them, but it doesn’t discount them right away. We will likely see changes in the future.
Now, on the goods!
The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) did not conduct this study on the basis of odometers or personal reports, but on calculations that look at the increase in residential energy consumption for homes with electric cars in California. It was a way of regulating information as most EV manufacturers do not want to share mileage information and cannot always be trusted to provide accurate information.
Instead, the researchers looked at a sample of California household electricity meters and compared meter readings with EV registration records. Of the 362,945 households analyzed, 57,290 hosted electric vehicles. The goal was to see how much extra electricity was used to charge electric cars, from which point 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 electric vehicle charging takes place at home.
The final conclusion is that “EVs travel 5,300 miles per year, less than half the average US vehicle fleet.”
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Of course we don’t get all the data here. Electric vehicle owners could charge more often outdoors than indoors. The researchers worked with a fairly small sample and used data from 2014-2017, when there were fewer electric vehicles on the road than now. It’s very possible that things are drastically different now.
The study was released to spark discussion and further research; it is more of a starting point than a conclusive study, intended to “raise important questions about the potential of the technology to replace the vast majority of rides that currently run on gasoline”.