Have electric vehicles never been so popular. Virtually every automaker is in the midst of an electrification effort, spurred by impending government regulations around the world to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But does the movement have an effect? Here in the US, plug-in vehicles are selling better than ever, despite supply chain shortages and frequent hefty dealer surcharges.
More than 2.1 million plug-in vehicles have been sold in the US between 2010 and the end of 2021, including 1.3 million battery EVs, according to Argonne National Lab. That sounds like a very impressive number, but keep in mind that this is out of a total national vehicle pool of nearly 276 million cars and trucks. Argonne estimates that despite all these plug-ins, national gas mileage will be reduced by just 0.54 percent by 2021.
In total, Argonne calculates that U.S. plug-in vehicles have driven nearly 70 billion miles since 2010, consuming 22 terawatt hours of energy. That has displaced the use of more than 2.5 billion gallons of gasoline and 19 million tons of greenhouse gases, Argonne reports, though for context, the U.S. consumed about 369 million gallons of gasoline per day by 2021. about 690 million liters of gasoline – about two days of consumption – and reduced CO2 emissions by 5.4 million tons, consuming 6.1 TWh.
The biggest growth in plug-in sales occurred in 2021, more than doubling from the previous year, from 308,000 vehicles to 634,000. That’s probably not too surprising given the number of new EVs that hit the market last year. In fact, sales of BEVs increased by 92 percent to 457,000 vehicles in 2021, while sales of plug-in hybrid EVs increased by 150 percent to 175,000.
Argonne assumed that plug-in drivers behave similarly to their gasoline counterparts, but applied a utility factor to PHEVs based on battery size and a mileage adjustment factor based on EPA estimated range for BEVs, based on an internal combustion engine vehicle that travels 13,500 miles (21,727 km), with a mix of 57 percent on the highway and 43 percent in the city. Proportional annual kilometers have also been reduced for 2020 and 2021 due to Covid-19.
Given that plug-in vehicles represent nearly 1 percent of all light vehicles on the road in the US, it’s disappointing that the reduction in gas mileage was only more than half a percent.
Argonne, however, provides evidence against naysayers who think electric vehicle adoption will crash the power grid — by 2021, electric vehicle charging will only account for 0.15 percent of all US electricity consumption. Interestingly, Argonne found that while the efficiency of the BEV has declined marginally since 2018, the electric range efficiency of the PHEV has dropped dramatically between 2019 and 2021, which Argonne attributes to the increasing size and weight of electrified SUVs.
Of course, this report is not an argument against people buying electric cars; every gas saving is an improvement over turning that gasoline into air pollution that exacerbates climate change. But it should be clear by now that electric cars alone are not a panacea for our transport-related climate problems, and that in the future many more people will have to walk, cycle or take the bus to get where they are going.
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
