For the last 100 years, the gas burning engine has
dominated and with the engine come pollutants.
Since 1971, the US Environmental Protection
Agency has been testing these vehicles to ensure
they comply with federal pollution rules.
But electric vehicles made up 8% of all new car
sales in the US in 2022, a 55% increase over the
previous year.
This is the exciting time right.
Now here in the lab in the industry.
A lot of change going on, a lot of new
understanding.
We're still kind of the Wild West of these things.
The regulatory environment around
electric vehicles is still changing pretty
fast.
Evs don't have tailpipes and they don't emit
pollutants. But the government still requires
automakers to run specific tests on their
electric cars and publish estimates of how far each
can drive on a single charge.
And the agency tests some of those vehicles itself
to ensure the estimates are accurate.
The fear of running out of battery called range
anxiety is one of the top concerns consumers have
about EVs and something keeping many of them from
making the switch.
The EPA's ratings are considered more accurate
for driving on American roads than systems used
elsewhere in the world.
But the EPA system still has its critics.
One report found that EVs fell short of their stated
EPA range by more than 12%.
They were less accurate than the EPA fuel economy
ratings for internal combustion vehicles.
In addition, inconsistencies in testing
rules can make differences in range among
brands seem larger on paper than they are in
real life.
This issue where a Tesla at with a 405 mile range
and a Porsche with a 250 mile range are practically
the same number in the real world.
So how is EV range determined by the EPA?
Why do some say the ranges are not accurate
and what can be done about it?
CNBC visited the EPA's National Vehicle and Fuel
Emissions Lab to find out.
We're here in Ann Arbor, Michigan, at EPA's
National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Lab.
This is the federal laboratory where all of
the auto emissions and fuel economy measurements
are made.
This car is an electric vehicle, a Chevrolet bolt.
It is about to undergo one of the tests the EPA
administers to determine its range, how long it can
drive on a single charge.
We do more than car testing here.
We test engines from large 18 wheel trucks.
We test non-road equipment that's in
agricultural construction. We test
little engines and lawnmowers and weed
whackers and snow blowers.
Most of the time, manufacturers test their
own vehicles and report the results to the EPA.
It is similar to the approach the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration takes with
safety certification.
The EPA can test any car, though it often will.
If there is a substantial vehicle refresh or update,
which typically happens every 3 to 7 years.
They provide us with a car that's either
pre-production before it goes into production or
shortly after a job, one when it's just into
production. We actually compare their submitted
results with what we get in the lab.
Most of the time they match up really good once
in a while. They don't. When they don't, then we
figure out why.
Usually sometimes we have to retest.
They have to retest.
If their numbers in our numbers don't line up,
then they take EPA's number as the official
number that's generated in this lab.
So total 300 cars a year get tested in the lab.
That represents about 15 to 20% of the models that
make up the US fleet in any given year.
150 new cars and 150 used ones to see how those are
performing throughout their entire life cycle.
In addition to enforcing its own rules and
providing information to the public, the EPA also
passes data generated here on to other agencies.
Data goes to the Department of
Transportation for corporate average fuel
economy or Cafe standards.
The average fuel economy an entire automaker's
fleet gets.
Numbers also go to the IRS for the gas guzzler
tax, a charge on all cars that are below a certain
mile per gallon rating.
Originally there were two tests a city test and a
highway test.
The city test is typical.
A morning drive in Los Angeles is actually where
it was built on the drive schedule built on the Los
Angeles morning drive in the mid 60s.
The highway test, which is more of a suburban
test, was actually derived from driving
around here in the Ann Arbor area.
The EPA added three more tests in 2008 to more
closely match real world driving conditions.
A test in cold weather at 20°F.
A hot weather test with the air conditioner
running and an aggressive driving test.
All the while, powertrains were changing.
The EPA began testing hybrid vehicles once the
Toyota Prius debuted in the United States in 2001,
it began testing electric vehicles after it
finalized rules for those in 2010.
It added equipment for charging electric
vehicles, for measuring the discharge of
electricity from the battery on a battery
electric or plug in hybrid.
But the dynamometers themselves, the
conditioning, the temperature controls, the
drive cycles, all of those are the same, with
just the addition of the new features for the
electrified part of the vehicle.
This is how the agency tests an testers first
charge the battery and park the car overnight.
The following morning it is subjected to a series
of tests on rollers called Dynamometers or
Dynos. These rollers are meant to simulate at least
some of the conditions of driving. For example,
engineers can add resistance to simulate
wind drag. Someone gets into the driver's seat,
the car is hooked up to a machine that measures how
much the battery is discharging relative to
the speed and distance traveled. There is a city
test, a highway test, and a third test known as the
steady state test, which consists of running the
vehicle at a constant speed until the battery is
fully depleted.
Then testers charge the battery again and time it.
At first, the test was simpler.
The standard test was run a city test Pause.
Run a city test Pause.
Run a city test. Pause from when the battery was
fully charged until the car couldn't stay on the
drive trace anymore.
They ran a highway test the same way as battery
capacity has increased, that has become
prohibitive.
We had to have three shifts of drivers coming
in and run these over and over. So we went to a
multi cycle tests and those allow us to both
combine city and highway and to accelerate that
depletion. So now, you know, 8 to 10 or 12 hours
we can deplete a battery instead of needing to run
those cycles over and over again for 20, 24 or
30 hours.
Part of the testing process also involves
applying a reduction factor to the numbers A
car gets in a test in order to account for real
world driving conditions.
Lab results are multiplied by a reduction
factor of 0.7.
Instead of the multi cycle test, automakers can
conduct a five cycle test similar to the one used
for gasoline vehicles.
That version includes the city and highway test,
along with tests in hot and cold weather and an
aggressive driving test at about 80mph.
The EPA does do some real world driving tests for
fuel emissions and is developing similar tests
for EVs.
So we are looking at how the Dynamometer compares
to some of the similar travel that we would see
out on the road and comparing some of those
things. But we also will look at how a battery
charging might happen out on the real world.
Figuring out how to test for the effects of heating
and cooling systems on range, for example, is
tough since there are so many different options in
any given vehicle for heating or cooling a
cabin.
So whether it's a heated seat or a heated steering
wheel or a cabin heating, all of these can have
different effects on range, determining which
one is best to represent the way the consumer is
going to use that, and then using that to provide
additional information on the effects of cold or hot
is one of the areas that we're doing work right now
in the lab.
That complexity is one of the many challenges the
EPA faces with EVs.
We have a lot of standards already for how
combustion vehicles get measured and the kinds of
data that they need to report to us in order to
do certification and compliance in order to
drive on the roads.
Those regulations are quite, I have to say,
wobble pretty obvious yet, because just the
kinds of data that they're generating is just
so new.
We've had 100 years of of, you know, looking at
economy and efficiency and emissions and
everything on gasoline cars we've only had at max
ten years of it. And I would say not even that
really just a few years, maybe 5 to 6 years where
it's become important enough that people are
focusing on it.
It isn't just the novelty, it is also the pace at
which everything is happening.
It is one of the fastest changing areas that we
deal with here in our laboratory. Just in terms
of how fast this technology is moving.
If you look at a vehicle that we had in here even
five years ago, a 2016 or 2017 electric vehicle
looks almost completely different to it than what
we're seeing with vehicles coming in 2024.
So every manufacturer kind of has their own way
of reporting data on where the power is coming
into and going out of the vehicle, how it's moving
around between the motors and the batteries, or if
it's doing things like regenerative braking,
where the strategies about how power goes to
the heating and cooling system. So versus how to
take the battery at the right temperature.
All this makes it hard to get lab results that match
real world driving.
I think that with our with the addition of the more
aggressive cycle and the mid 90s, I think people
are seeing that our fuel economy is much closer to
what you would see from the values on the label
versus what they're seeing on the road with
EV. It's a newer area, right?
Car and Driver magazine tested a 2018 model three
in cold conditions and found it got only 65% of
its stated range.
Triple A tested electric trucks under loads and
found they lost 25% of their EPA range.
Edmonds, a site that provides information on
cars, found that many EVs achieved ranges in their
tests that were quite different from EPA
ratings. Some were quite extreme.
A Porsche Taycan has an EPA estimate of 203 miles
on a single charge, but achieved 323 miles of
range on a charge in Edmunds tests.
A paper published by the Society of Automotive
Engineers in April 2023 leveled several criticisms
on how EV range is tested.
Among other things, the paper said the EPA
published only one total range number for each
vehicle, rather than separating range ratings
for city and highway driving, as it does for
fuel burning vehicles.
That total range number is weighted in favor of
city driving over highway. That is a
problem, the authors said. The paper drew on
testing data gathered by Car and Driver magazine.
One of the paper's authors, Dave Vanderwerp,
is director of vehicle testing at Car and Driver.
In gas vehicles.
The highway number is almost always better than
city. And in EVs it's the reverse.
Right? So people aren't seeing that, Oh, the
highway is quite a bit worse than city when you
just get this one combined number.
Evs are often equipped with regenerative braking.
That is a mechanism that captures energy from the
wheels as the vehicle is slowing down and stores it
back in the battery.
This gives them an edge in city driving where
there is a lot of speeding up, slowing down
and stopping. This is precisely where gas
powered vehicles are less efficient.
Even the EPA highway test involves a lot of speeding
up and slowing down, which gives regenerative
braking a chance to kick in.
Let's say you had 400in the city.
And 300 on the highway.
That gets combined to something like 340, and
that's what shows up on the label.
However, I think most people will have range
anxiety concerns when they're on the highways.
One car and driver test consists of driving a
vehicle at a constant 75mph. Most highways in
the US have speed limits of 70mph, with a few
states allowing as high as 85.
Car and driver testing data found that while
internal combustion cars actually outperformed
their EPA highway ratings by about 4% on average,
EVs fell short of their range number by 12.5%.
It shows that range can vary wildly depending on
how you drive the car.
If you're driving in one part of the country under
one set of conditions where it's really, really
hilly, or if you're driving somewhere else
where it's very flat, if you're driving in a place
where it's cold or it's really hot, this one
number will allow you to compare from model to
model, but it might not represent what you'd
actually get in all of those different driving
cycles.
The paper's authors, Pinone and Vanderwerp,
even say putting the total range on the
Monroney label is not accurate to real world
use. No one drives the car down to zero miles.
A car might have a stated range of 300 miles, but
the vast majority of drivers are likely to
recharge before the battery runs too low.
Different brands often report very different
total ranges on their vehicles.
But Pinone and Vanderwerp say the differences might
not amount to as much in real life and may be at
least partially attributed to the fact
that the EPA allows them to use different methods
to report the range on their cars.
Either the Multi-cycle test made up of a city and
highway test or a five cycle test that
incorporates hot weather, cold weather and
aggressive driving.
About 28% of gas burning vehicles use the five
cycle test, but about 50% of EVs do.
Why is that? Because it's beneficial tip In the gas
world, the five cycle was generally deemed as not
beneficial. So the automakers kind of stayed
away from it if they could, because a lot of
times come up with a worse number.
But Pinone and Vanderwerp say it can give an EV a
higher EPA range number than the standard multi
cycle test with its 0.7 reduction factor.
Their paper recommends, among other things, that
the EPA publish both city and highway range apply a
single multiplier close to 0.6 to get testing
closer to real world circumstances and make
every automaker run the same tests.
I think the range testing right now is relatively
stable. It's pretty representative.
It's not obvious that there's streamlining that
can be done that would significantly reduce the
test time that it takes to run these tests and
still get representative numbers.
But that work is being examined and studied at by
different manufacturers and by some independent
labs.
The EPA said the Range and fuel Economy section of
the Monroney sticker hasn't been updated since
2011, when there were few electric cars and plug in
hybrids. At the time, the decision was made to
combine the city and highway results to keep it
simple for consumers.
But the agency is continuing to evaluate the
procedures and methods used for determining EV
range and labeling, as it has done for gas vehicles
throughout its history.
It is revising the cold test, for example, for the
2025 model year based on Tesla's 2023 results.
The EPA estimates that for the Tesla Model Y
performance, the new range estimate would
theoretically decrease from 303 miles to 289
miles due to changes in the cold test, It said it
is reviewing the recent SAE paper, but that it
would be premature for us to comment on any specific
ideas or observations.
Automakers have a long history of pushing against
regulations, trying to find loopholes and
sometimes just lying and defrauding the public.
The Dieselgate scandal is perhaps the most recent
infamous example of this.
A number of automakers, but most notoriously
Volkswagen, were caught using devices intended to
cheat on EPA emissions tests.
The scandal rocked VW, currently the world's
second largest automaker, leading to billions in
fines and payouts and jail sentences for top
executives. It also precipitated the German
carmakers dramatic pivot toward electric vehicles
and helped fund VW nearly $2.5 billion Electrify
America Charging Infrastructure Project.
The scandal also shaped the EPA.
They simply don't have the resources to to look hard
at electric vehicles.
In fact, they are still reeling from the
Dieselgate and and trying to ensure that that, you
know, from an emissions standpoint that we're
doing the right thing for the environment and can
100% appreciate that.
Right. Electric vehicles really are not bad for the
environment in the same way that gasoline powered
vehicles are.
There are still concerns consumers need to be
protected.
If automakers have been sort of allowed to stretch
the regulations further than maybe they should.
Getting that back in the bag is going to be coming
increasingly harder.
And now with the governmental push towards
EVs. It's time to.
It's time to make sure that. That it's right.
Every test we do for is just a little bit more
standing on the whole all of what can what your was
do, what might they do in the future and what what
should we look out for when the next vehicle
comes it.
We're consumers as well and you know, scientists
and engineers looking at this stuff.
So it's really important for us to look at what
might those issues be and how do we apply it and how
do we test for those things as well.