Update: Fisker Karma Electric Car Gets Worse Mileage Than an SUV

The Fisker Karma electric car, developed mainly with your tax money so that a bunch of rich VC’s wouldn’t have to risk any real money, has rolled out with an nominal EPA MPGe of 52.

Not bad? Unfortunately, it’s a sham. This figure is calculated using the grossly flawed EPA process that substantially underestimates the amount of fossil fuels required to power the electric car, as I showed in great depth in an earlier Forbes.com article. In short, the EPA methodology leaves out, among other things, the conversion efficiency in generating the electricity from fossil fuels in the first place.

In the Clinton administration, the Department of Energy (DOE) created a far superior well to wheels MPGe metric the honestly compares the typical fossil fuel use of an electric vs. gasoline car.

Anyone remember the stories about the cardboard car made in the old Eastern Bloc countries that were government designed and paid for by government research? They barely ran, were overpriced with the subsidy, and the wait list was years.

I think this is a total commie car just like in old USSR Days. You can expect no better.

As I calculated in my earlier Forbes article, one needs to multiply the EPA MPGe by .365 to get a number that truly compares fossil fuel use of an electric car with a traditional gasoline engine car on an apples to apples basis. In the case of the Fisker Karma, we get a true MPGe of 19. This makes it worse than even the city rating of a Ford Explorer SUV.

Actually, it's far far worse than than. This comparison is only done at the beginning of the car battery life, when it's at its' highest efficiency--efficiency being the amount energy charged to the battery divided by the amount of energy extracted from the battery on each charge/discharge cycle. Of course no battery is 100% efficient--you will never get the same amount of energy out of a battery that you put into it.

Starting from the very first charge, the battery starts to degrade and its' capacity drops, along with its' efficiency--slowly at first, but the drop increases with more charge/discharge cycles. Simply put, it takes an increasing amount of energy to do the same amount of work (drive the car x # of miles) over the life of the battery.

I have never seen any analysis of modern electric car batteries that take this into account. Any comparison of fuel economy with gasoline powered vehicles that does not consider this has no merit. And that does not even include the energy and other resources required to replace the battery periodically.

BTW, something else occurred to me, something else that to my knowledge is never considered...batteries EITHER charge OR discharge. As soon as a battery finishes a charge cycle, it starts to discharge, whether it's in use or not. ALL batteries discharge when they are not charging. It may be just a tiny amount when the battery is new, but this is something else that will increase over the life of the battery. Multiply that wasted discharge by hundreds of thousands or even millions of electric cars, and there will be a whole lot of electrical energy that basically evaporates into nothingness. How 'green' is that?

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