What's Wrong With This Picture: The 99 MPG Non Sequitur Edition
Published: November 23rd, 2010
Share
Why does the Nissan Leaf get a 99 MPG from the EPA? After all, you could pour gallons of gasoline into the thing and it wouldn’t budge an inch. It is, after all, an electric car. But hey, this ain’t America if a consumer can’t glance at a label and say “gosh honey, check out how many em-pee-gees this one gets. That sure is a whole lot of em-pee-gees.” And at least the EPA did include the most important detail: the Leaf’s battery range is rated 73 miles, or about three quarters the range Nissan had been claiming. Of course, as is always the case, your mileage may vary… only the amount of gasoline required by a Nissan Leaf won’t.
More by Edward Niedermeyer
Comments
Join the conversation
The interesting thing to me is does this now set the far right of the spectrum for all C segment labels. i.e., a hypermiling Cruze at 42 MPG now looks like it is worse than average on the linear scale (since they only put the max and mix, not the median).
>>GE is General Electric – when did it change its name. At this rate no company will want a G as an initial because loony people will insert Government in there regardless of facts.
Indeed Loon alert. I thought inserting Government into the name of a company (like GM) meant it was majority owned by the Government. Now it seems that the name is inserted if a company takes stimulus money (article from cato a poster linked to above). Well that is a lot of construction companies since we got some new roads oh and yes lots of tax cuts. If you don`t like the stimulus package then give back the $1600 you got from it. Thank God GE didn`t collapse. It seems the loons want lots of big companies to fail and then say "well true market capitalism ideology was best served, sod the millions unemployed". I hope you are not doing any busines with Goldman Sachs (or should that be Government Sachs!), Wachovia, Bank of America etc since they all had a bailout - since repaid with interest to us. So we made a profit.
Ed, The reason for the 73 mile range is the battery capacity of the Leaf is 24 kWh. With average electric consumtion of 34 kWh/100 miles, that works out to 71 miles, close to the 73 figure EPA comes up with. It's possible EPA tested the battery and came up with a slightly higher battery capacity than Nissan has advertised. Might also be rounding errors.