Energy Department Caught Massively Cheating to Boost Electric Vehicle Efficiency Data and Corporate Media Is Ignoring It

Corporate cheating scandals are always big news. They often result in huge fines and can lead to class-action lawsuits when giant companies flub data to keep the public in the dark. But the latest automotive data cheating scandal is getting zero attention. Why? Because it’s not the companies but the U.S. Department of Energy that is doing the cheating.

The reason, of course, is because they are desperate to push their so-called “green” agenda to fight so-called “climate change” so they intentionally manipulated fuel efficiency data so consumers wouldn’t realize how awful electric vehicles really are.

As WSJ noted, this isn’t a minor adjustment. The federal government allows EV companies to multiply their reported efficient by nearly 700% [Emphasis Added]:

It’s hard to think of a worse environmental scandal in recent years than Volkswagen’s 2015 diesel-emissions cheating. The German automaker was rightly pursued by regulators, enforcement agencies and class-action lawyers.

The scandal ended up costing Volkswagen an estimated $33 billion in fines and financial settlements—and revealed that diesel-emissions cheating was endemic. In 2020 Daimler AG made a $1.5 billion settlement over emissions cheating in Mercedes-Benz diesel vehicles. (One of us helped secure that settlement.) Last year engine maker Cummins agreed to pay $1.7 billion to settle claims that it skirted diesel-emissions standards.

In all of these cases, regulators punished carmakers that had cut corners and misled the public. But when it comes to electric cars, the government has a cheating scandal of its own. That scandal, grabbing far fewer headlines, is buried deep in the Federal Register—on page 36,987 of volume 65.

When carmakers test gasoline-powered vehicles for compliance with the Transportation Department’s fuel-efficiency rules, they must use real values measured in a laboratory. By contrast, under an Energy Department rule, carmakers can arbitrarily multiply the efficiency of electric cars by 6.67. This means that although a 2022 Tesla Model Y tests at the equivalent of about 65 miles per gallon in a laboratory (roughly the same as a hybrid), it is counted as having an absurdly high compliance value of 430 mpg. That number has no basis in reality or law.

For exaggerating electric-car efficiency, the government rewards carmakers with compliance credits they can trade for cash. Economists estimate these credits could be worth billions: a vast cross-subsidy invented by bureaucrats and paid for by every person who buys a new gasoline-powered car.

Until recently, this subsidy was a Washington secret. Carmakers and regulators liked it that way. Regulators could announce what sounded like stringent targets, and carmakers would nod along, knowing they could comply by making electric cars with arbitrarily boosted compliance values. Consumers would unknowingly foot the bill.

The secret is out. After environmental groups pointed out the illegality of this charade, the Energy Department proposed eliminating the 6.67 multiplier for electric cars, recognizing that the number “lacks legal support” and has “no basis.”

Carmakers have panicked and asked the Biden administration to delay any return to legal or engineering reality. That is understandable. Without the multiplier, the Transportation Department’s proposed rules are completely unattainable. But workable rules don’t require government-created cheat codes. Carmakers should confront that problem head on.

This is a bombshell story and WSJ is among the few in corporate media covering it. The rest that did take note made sure to bury the story as far back as possible. Between government, corporate media, activists, and the Globalist Elite Cabal, they will do anything they can to make people believe electric vehicles aren’t nearly as disastrous as they currently are.

From the article: It’s hard to think of a worse environmental scandal in recent years than Volkswagen’s 2015 diesel-emissions cheating.

The scandal was that Obama The Clown doubled the EPA miles per gallon standard to 54.5 mpg. A government agency that has no authority to set requirements on manufacturers put forth a fictitious requirement that could only be met if manufacturers cheated on the test.

https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/obama-announces-new-standards-to-double-vehicle-mpg-by-2025/

Fortunately President Trump threw out Obama The Clown's illegal mandate.

Yes it's less cost per mile to drive an EV if you charge it at home. With Alabama gas and power rates, maybe 12K to 14K miles per year is the threshold where driving an EV has enough gas savings to warrant the other costs that go into having an EV. If we go back to year 2019 gas and power prices (Trump prices, but without the covid factor), then the threshold is about 15K miles per year. My wife and I drove our EV 26K miles last year, with 16K of them charged at home. There are other factors I would look at before getting an EV (be married and need two cars anyway so that one can be an ICE car for the few times an EV won't do, don't let the EV in your marriage be the pickup, don't live in cold climate, be able to charge at home, look at most of the road trips you regularly take and make sure there are good charging options so you don't have to take the ICE car every time especially if the ICE car is an old pickup you don't like on road trips, etc.). My wife and I meet all of those criteria, so having an EV works for us. I obviously write this as not being anti-EV.

Yet, the premise of the article is 100% correct. EV's have a fake "metric" called MPGe that's about as contrived and unrealistic as a Chris Christie diet plan. I had to dig deep into the internal specs to find a true miles/kWh mileage in various EV's to come up with the above practical thresholds for if an EV is good for certain use cases. I'm sure that the government's fake MPGe metric allows the car companies to skimp on the various carbon regulations, and allows the solely EV companies (Tesla) get more fake carbon credits to sell to oil refineries (the RIN purchases, which IIRC is about 50¢ to 75¢ for every gallon of gas they produce). Back to EV's being cheaper to drive. Our EV (crossover shape) gives a real throughput of 3.2 miles/kWh (that includes running the AC/heat and headlights, it also includes sometimes driving it 80mph on trips and other times 45mph near home, last but not least I reduced it by 5% to account for the conversion loss from AC to DC when charging the EV). In the last 12 power bills our kWh rate hovered between 15.3¢ to 16.6¢ per kWh (not including flat monthly fees and taxes, just looking at the standard per rate kWh and the fuel charge per kWh and the state tax per kWh --- for every extra kWh added to the bill it adds about 16¢ to the bill). So of the 5,000 kWh charging at home last year (16K miles / 3.2 miles/kWh), that would have added $800 to my power bills for the year (if I didn't have solar providing 83% of my power internally). Or another way to say it, adding $10 to your power bill would get you 62.5kWh, which gets you 200 miles (less if you're about to go on a road trip driving 80mph, more if you're staying local driving 45mph).

Not shabby. And that's an EV with a a crossover shape instead of a sedan shape (the Kia EV6 gets better miles / kWh than mine). So EV's bring something to the table that IMHO would make them do fine in a free market for people who drive a lot.

The problem is that the Dims do everything they can to make it not a free market with car options and energy to move your car.

To perform proper economic analysis, the first task is to establish an optimized base case. The second task is to accurately draw the complete economic envelope around the problem fully identifying all costs. Third is to assess each of those costs and confirm that they are in fact incremental costs or not.

Just looking at the cost of refueling a car is interesting, but meaningless. If it makes you “feel” good that’s fine, but from understanding costs and economic choices it is, in fact, meaningless and even misleading.

Personal decisions about selecting an EV may or may not be good economic ones, but looking at refueling costs in isolation not.

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