Improved fuel economy by a factor of 3?
The Examiner newspaper ran a great story on just what impact plug-in hybrid electric cars could have on gasoline consumption for U.S. drivers. Here are their calculations:
“Let’s assume here that the car gets 35 miles per gallon (mpg) when running the gasoline engine. If the total length of the trip is 40 miles then no gasoline is used so mpg is infinite. If the total length of the trip is 70 miles then car burns 0.85 gallons of fuel or the equivalent of 82 mpg. This would indicate that a fleet of these cars with typical round-trip commuting distances would average 107 mpg. These numbers get even better if you can recharge your car at work.”
Using the same 35 miles per gallon scale the paper reports that a trip of 50 miles would yield fuel economy of 175 miles per gallon and a trip of 100 miles would yield a fuel economy of 58 miles per gallon. Even if The Examiner’s numbers are overly generous, this is still an amazing achievement considering the fuel economy average for today’s cars is 24.7 mpg.
What would this mean for oil use? The Examiner says “You could take any size car and with an electric hybrid design like the Chevy Volt, expect to improve you mpg by a factor of 3 times.” In February 2008 the U.S. imported 10.5 million barrels of oil per day. If everyone used a plug-in vehicle the U.S. could have reduced daily oil imports by around 7 million barrels. The impact adopting this technology will have on oil imports and energy security cannot be understated.
