As some of you know, I have prototyped a high efficiency vehicle for production and for entry into the Automotive X Prize contest. It gets 700 mpg in its plug-in form. If you read through this thread, you can see the logic (illogic?) used to arrive at that number.
With a plug-in vehicle, two sources of energy are used: electricity (typically from the grid), and gasoline. When the Aptera people picked a figure for their vehicle, they arbitrarily used a 120 mile drive. When I came up with my equally ludicrous figure, I arbitrarily picked an average daily commuting distance. Following their lead, I completely ignored the dollar and environmental cost of electricity -- which (in both respects) is in the same ballpark as gasoline if, as in a hybrid, the gasoline is used relatively efficiently (i.e relative to awful).
I'd favor a standard for electric and plug-in vehicles that accurately states the watt hours used per mile, and the range on battery power alone. Equivalent mpg is far too prone to claims that border on fraudulent.
For example, here's an article about a 300 mpg Prius. Does it make sense that a Prius could get the same mileage as an Aptera, given that the Aptera is less than half the weight, lower in frontal area, has a drag coefficient less than half that of the Prius, and has a much more highly loaded, smaller engine? You can see how deceptive these claims can be: For every claim a competitor makes, I could simply shorten my "typical commuting distance": if it gets below 30 miles then I get infinite mpg -- beat that!
One would hope that a standard for mileage claims would be not have to be legislated -- but it has already been done for ordinary cars, and needs to be done for electric cars and plug-in hybrids. In these days, when the energy you use has security, environmental, and economic impacts, you deserve straight answers. Write your congressman.
PS: There is already a calculation used by the EPA for CAFE purposes that some electric car companies have picked up on. If you read through this piece of the Federal Register you can see how convoluted things can get. Their basic calculation for well-to-wheels gasoline equivalent in the center of page 36987 is about as expected. But then they go on to add a scarcity factor of 6.67, because they want to promote alternative fuels. If you go to the end of the document, you'll see that "equivalent" mileage figures can therefore get very high. My Pod One (realistically a 120 mpg vehicle) would get 745 mpg.
Finally! A real 700 mpg car.
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