Electric vehicles have has never been so popular. Nearly every automaker is in the midst of an electrification effort, spurred by looming government regulations around the world aimed at reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. But does the movement have an effect? Here in the United States, plug-in vehicles are selling better than ever, despite supply chain shortages and frequent high dealer markups.
According to Argonne National Lab, between 2010 and the end of 2021, more than 2.1 million plug-in vehicles were sold in the United States, including 1.3 million battery electric vehicles. This seems like a very impressive number, but keep in mind that this is a total national vehicle fleet of almost 276 million cars and trucks. Argonne estimates that despite all these plug-ins, national gasoline consumption was only reduced by 0.54% in 2021.
In total, Argonne calculates that American plug-in vehicles have traveled nearly 70 billion miles since 2010, consuming 22 terawatt hours of energy. This replaced the consumption of more than 2.5 billion gallons of gasoline and 19 million tons of greenhouse gases, Argonne reports, although for context, the United States consumed about 369 million gallons of gasoline per day in 2021. For 2021 specifically, plug-in vehicles saved approximately 690 million gallons of gasoline, or approximately two days of consumption, and a reduction in CO emissions2 emissions of 5.4 million tonnes, consuming 6.1 TWh in the process.
The biggest growth in plug-in vehicle sales occurred in 2021, more than doubling from the previous year, from 308,000 vehicles to 634,000. This is probably not very surprising, given the number of new electric vehicles arrived on the market last year. In fact, BEV sales increased 92% to 457,000 vehicles in 2021, while plug-in hybrid electric vehicle sales increased 150% to 175,000.
Argonne assumed that plug-in drivers behaved much like their gasoline counterparts, but applied a utility factor to PHEVs based on battery size and a mileage adjustment factor based on vehicle-estimated range. EPA for BEVs, the benchmark being an internal combustion engine vehicle driven 13,500 miles (21,727 km), with a mix of 57% highway driving and 43% city driving. Proportional reductions in annual mileage due to Covid-19 have also been applied for 2020 and 2021.
Given that plug-in vehicles represent nearly 1 percent of all light-duty vehicles on the road in the United States, it’s disappointing that the reduction in gasoline consumption is just over half a percent.
However, Argonne provides evidence against naysayers who believe EV adoption will cause the power grid to collapse: In 2021, EV charging accounted for just 0.15% of all U.S. electricity consumption . Interestingly, Argonne found that while BEV efficiency has declined slightly since 2018, PHEV electric range efficiency has actually dropped dramatically between 2019 and 2021, which Argonne attributes to the size and the increasing weight of electrified SUVs.
This report is of course not an argument against people buying electric vehicles; any saving on gasoline is an improvement in transforming this gasoline into air pollution which worsens climate change. But it should be clear by now that electric vehicles alone are not a panacea for our transportation-related climate problems, and that the future will require many more people to walk, bike, or take the bus to get there where they are going.
This story was originally published on Ars Technica.
