Why are EV Manufacturers Hiding their Cars' Energy Efficiency?

I don’t do conspiracy theory, and the answer to my title’s question is not “it’s a conspiracy.” Still, it’s hard to avoid opening this essay without sounding a bit conspiratorial. After all, capitalists (and capitalism) are constantly singing the praises of efficiency: when they tell us they are going to “disrupt” something or “eliminate friction,” all they mean is that (they think) they’ve found a way to do something more efficiently. And when it comes the car industry, everyone knows the usually well-advertised efficiency metric for cars: miles per gallon. So why won’t car manufacturers selling electric cars tell prospective buyers the efficiency of those cars?

In order to give a non-conspiracy-theory answer, let’s first take a step back and lay some of the blame here on Economics, which has long done a great job of rendering the question of efficiency obscure, starting with the very textbook definition of economics as “the efficient allocation of scarce resources.” This is perhaps the worst definition imaginable; it proves false at every single turn.

Economics is not a universal science because economic forces and relations are themselves historically contingent. We can study feudalism and capitalism as particular types of social orders with peculiar economic and social arrangements, but there is no ahistorical “economics” for us to study.

And if we choose to study capitalist economic forces (as I do), then our first step must be to observe the obvious: the logic of capital has no interest whatsoever in “efficiently allocating resources,” and every interest in maximizing profits. Capital has no desire¹ for efficiency per se, and capitalists will happily (and correctly!) sacrifice efficiency for profit.

This is not at all to deny the very important, if much more subtle and indirect, relation between capitalism and efficiency. Capital’s goal is not efficiency, but in seeking the goal of maximizing value, capitalist social orders do tend to ruthlessly push for technological changes that substitute capital for labor, rendering production process more efficient along the way. We don’t need to speculate about the future of AI to see this. Just look at the machine loom.

The rudimentary but constantly made mistake is to confuse this element of a larger complex process with a general drive for efficiency of the system as a whole. Of course the capitalist wants to produce more widgets per hour of labor, but this is “efficiency” for the sake of profit, and the capitalist only pursues the former so long and as far as it culminates in the latter. Technology is not the driver of this process (capital is), and the state of technology is dictated not by some exogenous force called “science,” but by the needs and aims of the capitalist firm. If Apple can remain one of the most valuable firms in the world, with iPhones as their core profit engine, then they will continue to make iPhones by hand.

Therefore, while there will often be incentives to improve input/output efficiency in the production of capitalist widgets, the outcome is never guaranteed. We should also take note of the conceptual slippage relied upon by the dumb definition of economics: capitalist firms, when set in competition with one another,² will often increase the efficiency of their production processes – their output of widgets will increase relative to their labor and capital inputs. But this has nothing at all to do with the allocation of that output within society. Capitalist production processes can be running at peak efficiency, all to produce widgets (including food, clothing, and shelter) that only get distributed to say the richest 60% of society. And despite many getting none of the distribution, a huge portion may end up being destroyed as unused excess. There is nothing “efficient” about any of this, but capitalism doesn’t care as long as profit is being maximized.

OK, what does any of this have to do with electric cars (EVs)?

Well, to be perfectly honest, I had planned to write about Elon Musk and the recent transformation of Tesla into a meme stock. And I still do plan to do so! But along the way I came to the realization that this core problem of efficiency is not just endemic to Economics’ self-understanding as a discipline but also plays a key part in the story of meme stocks, crypto, and casino capitalism today.

More to the point, it seems to me as though there is something very weird going on with the advertising and sales of electric cars, at least in North America, and that it might well be worth pointing out the weirdness to readers – both for the lofty reason that it might tell us something meaningful about capitalism, value, and the issue of climate change today, and for the really elementary reason of providing basic information to any readers out there who already own an EV or might be considering buying one.

I recently found myself in that position of prospective EV-buyer, and even though I had spent a lot of timing thinking about efficiency, I still allowed myself to be badly misled by the advertising and general discourse around EVs. This post is an attempt to use my own confusion for good, in the hopes it alleviates or forestalls others’ confusion.

I’ll state the conclusion here and then try to unpack it: when it comes to marketing and selling EVs in the US right now, what we might call the “dialogue” between car manufacturer and potential buyer,³ we have totally obfuscated – nay, downright elided – EV efficiency. In its place we have substituted a kind of generalized moral self-righteousness (the assuaging of liberal guilt for those who can afford it), along with a new and quickly ossified feature: range.

Americans, more than any other car buyers in the world, are weirdly freaked out about running out of battery power in their EV. In 1997 a journalist coined the term “range anxiety,” which General Motors then trademarked in 2010 as part of their rollout campaign for the Chevy Volt. To be clear, Chevy decided the best way to sell their version of an electric car was by scaring everyone about electric cars: they categorized the Volt as an E-REV – an “extended-range electric vehicle,” unlike all those other EVs whose range was just totally not extended.⁴

The point of this anecdote is that the majority of prospective EV-buyers today want to hear a comforting narrative about range before they fork over enormous sums of money for a car. Most manufacturers are telling that story very bluntly: by cramming the biggest battery packs they can fit into their cars, and making range the headline feature of their car.⁵ This is obvious if you go to the car websites: from SUVs to sporty cars, from $30k cars, to $150k cars, the stat is “range” – shown up front in really large font. Indeed, if you are in the market for an EV and you waste some hours surfing car websites, you will quickly come to identify range as the most important number that captures how good the car is. Talk to car buyers (or listen to them talk to one another on reddit) and you quickly see how range starts to become a value in itself – obviously a car with 320 mile range is simply much better than one with 260. Obviously.

But we only need to take the smallest step back from the car-maker’s hype to observe the bizarre nature of this development. First, ICE cars also have a “range,” yet hardly anyone cares what that number is, and today’s car manufacturers do not include that number at all in their specifications, much less lead with it in their sales pitch. Second, one would have thought that the overall switch from ICE to EV has a whole lot to do with energy efficiency. And here again, we have long been in possession and common use of a key metric of efficiency for ICE cars: it’s called miles per gallon (MPG). Every manufacturer includes it in the specs for their car, and if the car is particularly efficient, they will feature it prominently in their online presentation of the cars. In either case, if you care about the efficiency of your gas car, it’s easy to find on the website.

Not so when it comes to EVs. Go shopping for an electric car and all you will find is the range number. Indeed, you will be continually bombarded with that number, including various ways to increase it: by far the biggest “upgrade” for any EV is to step up to a version of the same car with greater range (because it has a larger battery pack), with the price increase often being $5,000–$10,000, sometimes as much as a 20% increase to the price of the car.

But more than this, the range number (which is not a measure of efficiency) comes to stand in for the MPG number (which is). Both are numbers established by the regulatory agency (in this case the EPA) and the specifications clearly indicate that the range is “EPA estimated,” in a way that parallels the EPA rating for MPG on an ICE vehicle. It’s very natural and quite easy to think that the system breaks down as follows: for ICE cars, more MPG is better efficiency; for EVs more range is better efficiency.

Nothing could be further from the truth: range is not a measure of efficiency on EVs any more than having a huge gas tank is a measure of efficiency on ICE cars.

The relation to the EPA matters, because the EPA cannot come up with a verified range number without also calculating the efficiency of the car. In order for them to estimate how far the car will go on a full charge, they will need to know/discover two things:

(A) Battery size
(B) Efficiency of the car

Range is not an attribute or specification: it’s a derived result:

Range = Battery size / Efficiency | A/B | kWh / [kWh/m]

For ICE cars, it has been standard practice for decades to lead with (B), as reported in miles per gallon.⁶ Very few buyers cared about range, but if it mattered they could always look up the size of the gas tank and then multiply that number times MPG to get the “range” the vehicle could travel before refueling. Because range was not an essential attribute, manufacturers had very little incentive to put 30-gallon gas tanks in their cars.

To be clear, the EPA provides a direct-equivalent efficiency metric for EVs, called MPGe,⁷ which allows one to compare general energy efficiency across all types of vehicles – ICE, BEV, PHEV, etc. Moreover, within the BEV category, the EPA also provides a proper electrical efficiency rating, in the form of kWh/100miles.⁸ You can easily look these numbers up on the EPA website, fueleconomy.gov.

Yet manufacturers are not reporting either of those EPA-determined specifications of energy efficiency. Instead, they are reporting the derived result, range. In other words, the companies selling EVs are utterly eliding/hiding/obscuring any actual metric that reports the energy efficiency of the car.

I find this…well, a bit shocking. Naively, I would have thought EV shoppers would be more concerned about energy efficiency than customers buying ICE cars. But for those EV buyers who do worry about efficiency, they will have to do a ton of work on their own to find the numbers.

And the manufacturers’ websites will be of no help. Go to Ford.com and see how long it takes you to find: (i) the MPG rating of any ICE car they sell, and (ii) an energy efficiency rating for the Ford Mustang Mach-E, their most important EV. … (i) is a breeze, but I’ll spare you the suffering on (ii) – you cannot find an MPGe or a kWh/100m statistic there. If you waste a lot of time on this page for the Mach-E you can locate references to MPGe in footnote 2, but you will not find any actual MPGe numbers on the page, nor will you find the marker for footnote 2.

As an apology for Ford, one might surmise that as a “legacy carmaker,” they want to simplify things for their customers and alleviate their range anxiety – so they report only EPA range. Maybe. But what about an utterly non-legacy car company – say, Rivian? Rivian is absolutely cutting edge; their basic business model is to out-Tesla Tesla by starting not just (as Telsa did) with a high-end car, but with the car that Americans want most – a really large SUV. You can spend as long as you want surfing Rivian.com, and you’ll find no mention whatsoever of MPGe or kWh/100m. Range? Yes. 0–60 times for your family SUV? Absolutely. Energy efficiency of your climate-saving, zero-emission, all-electric vehicle? Nope.

What’s going on here?

That’s neither a rhetorical nor a pedagogical question. I’m serious when I ask, WTF? While I certainly don’t have a parsimonious explanation, I’ll conclude by making some guesses:

Most of the money being made in EV sales today comes from some extremely inefficient cars, and neither the folks selling the cars, nor the ones buying them want to talk about this fact. The car manufacturers can advertise a zero-emission vehicle with 440 miles of range, and the buyer can feel good about their purchase. No one needs to talk about, or perhaps even realize that that very car is arguably less energy-efficient than a 1991 Honda.⁹

Most importantly, nothing in the above is an an aberration. Constructing, sometimes even hypostatizing “features” – in this case range – and selling based on those, proves inherent to the economic model of car sales, because it’s inherent to capitalism. Any readers over the age of 45 will be able to periodize the recent history of cars into before cup holders and after cup holders.¹⁰ In the “before,” it would have struck almost everyone as crazy that one would judge the quality of one’s transportation – and one of the biggest purchases that most people make – by whether or not there was a cubby hole somewhere to place your takeout soft-drink cup. But in the “after” it became a cruel reality for some car manufacturers, as many people started making “number of cupholders” an absolute top criterion for their car-shopping.

Yet “range” is not just any new feature, because the shift to range (and the elision of efficiency) marks a transformation of the technology. From first principles one might suppose that we would judge cars that run on electricity such that more efficient cars are better cars. But we never found ourselves in the domain of first principles. We find ourselves in the domain of capitalism, where the role played by technology will be determined not by its own logic of optimization, but by the logic of capital. And capital does not optimize on efficiency; it optimizes on value. Or, to paraphrase Dave Karpf: the arc of technology “bends toward money.”

Postcript

As always, I write here mainly from the perspective of capitalist power. I am therefore attempting in the above to explain what’s actually going on (EV efficiency numbers are nowhere to be found!) and what it tells us about value in a capitalist social order.

However, one could also take up this issue from the perspective of the fight against climate change, and in that context we find a common and potentially viable counter-argument to my entire line of implicit critique here. It goes like this: for EVs, efficiency doesn’t matter. If the goal is reduced emissions and a slowing or reversing of global warming, the project proceeds in two steps: in step 1, remove climate emissions from the nation’s vehicle fleet; then, in step 2, convert the nation’s electrical grid to renewables. Energy efficiency becomes irrelevant in a world where all energy-consumption is electrical and the source of that electricity is 100% renewable energy. To quote my sister-in-law, who very incisively expressed this argument to me (even if she herself doesn’t necessarily defend it): if the electrons are green, who cares where they come from.

The thrust of my reply would be to point out that the “climate change perspective” cannot be divorced from capitalism, any more than anything else can. Hence the above line of logic turns out faulty because in step 1 it essentially gives in fully to capitalism: sure, sell $100,000, 7,000-pound trucks, and make your high profit-margins, as this is a step on the way to a zero-emissions planet. But this concession in step 1 can only be justified if we somehow assume that step 2 will also work successfully within the terms of the logic of capital (just as step 1 did). And I want to say: we know that’s not true. For the foreseeable future, selling oil and gas will be more profitable than building wind farms. So deciding to massively increase the demand on the current electrical grid, and just hoping that it will somehow get modernized and converted to renewables on its own – seems like a bad plan.

None of that is an argument against buying EVs, even relatively inefficient ones, which are still more efficient than their ICE equivalents. But it seems to me, and perhaps I’m being credulous here, that though efficiency is not the aim of capitalism, perhaps it ought to be something of an intrinsic goal for us. If we can use less and generate more, isn’t that a better way of being in the world? I dunno…when it’s 60 degrees Fahrenheit outside, don’t run the air-conditioner, just open the window; eat the leftovers in the fridge rather than throwing them out; and if while shopping for EVs you go to a dealer and see two similar-priced (and relatively affordable) cars, at least be aware that this one uses 24 kWh/100 mi, while that one is 42% less energy-efficient (34 kWh/100 mi).

1. Yes, I’m personifying capital here. Don’t freak out. I’m talking about the interests and desires of capital, not because I think capital is a sentient being, but only as a shorthand for describing the forces and relations, the mechanisms of power, that weave their way through and structure any capitalist social order. Every individual living in capitalist society experiences these forces and relations, though they experience them differently depending on which subject position they happen to be occupying (e.g., “capitalist,” “manager,” “worker,” “consumer.”). But we can also discern a broader overall “logic” of capital within that social order; we can identify the “rules of capitalism.” Speaking of the “interests” of capital offers a quicker way of getting at the fact that capitalism is a system in which value self-valorizes, in which the system depends upon a sum of money starting a production process that will lead to an augmented sum of money. (That doesn’t always happen successfully, but such failure has repercussions – and that’s part of the point.)

2. And lest we forget, they spend an enormous amount of their time trying to avoid engaging in such competition.

3. As I will try to show, the “fault” here lies not with a lack of regulation. The numbers are on the regulator’s website, and the regulator requires the numbers to be placed on the car’s window sticker. (I literally didn’t even realize the efficiency of the car I had already bought until I spread out the window sticker on the kitchen table and then noticed the MPGe rating.) But the car companies are not displaying those numbers anywhere else, and potential buyers are not looking for them.

4. For those interested in the technical aspects: the Volt really was a different type of electric vehicle. It looks a lot like today’s plug-in hybrids (PHEV), so much so that its Wikipedia page says (falsely) that it was a PHEV. But hybrids today combine internal-combustion engines (ICE) and electric battery power in order to turn the wheels of your car. A PHEV can run just like a normal ICE car, using gas and the combustion engine to directly power the car’s drivetrain. The Volt can’t do that. Only the electric motor can power the car; the gasoline engine comes into play only as a backup generator for the battery. Therefore GM’s categorization of the Volt was not wrong: this was an EV with a backup system for extending range. E-REVs are still produced and sold today, and compared to PHEVs they have the advantage of technological simplicity. Ironically, given both GM’s success selling the Volt and scaring people about range, E-REVs do not fare well today in the North American market precisely because they have less range than either PHEVs, which can rely on the ICE to go for great distances, or Battery EVs (BEVS), which can fit much larger battery packs).

5. Here’s a different argument for the car-manufacturers’ focus on range: an efficiency metric expressed in Wh/m (or kWh/100m, or m/kWh) would be too confusing to car-buyers. The prospective buyer was presumed to be able to understand miles per gallon because they (well, at least some) buy milk by the gallon, and also to understand something like “range” as analogous to how long their phone battery would last. But both energy per mile or mile per unit of energy were thought to be too complex.

6. Choosing MPG as the metric for ICE fuel efficiency arguably turns out to have been a significant mistake because the numbers are confusing. Most people don’t realize that replacing a 15 MPG vehicle with an 18 MPG vehicle saves much more gas than replacing a 30 MPG vehicle with a 35 MPG vehicle (the former saves more than twice as much fuel). A better expression of efficiency would be gallons per mile (or 100 miles) because it more intuitively expresses what we really want to know: how much energy/fuel do I need to use to go a set distance. Though the numbers themselves are buried on the EPA website, they have corrected this mistake with EVs, where the standard expression of efficiency is either Wh/m (Watt-hours/mile, which some cars, notably Teslas, display directly to the driver) or kWh/100 mi (used by the EPA).

7. This number depends on translating the energy from a gallon of gasoline into watts, a conversation that assumes 1 gallon of gas is equivalent to 33.7kWh.

8. Confusingly, the EPA’s kWh/100m metric does not actually measure the efficiency of the car, but rather the cost of “fueling” it. That is, this number tells you how many kWh of electricity you’ll need to pay for in order for your car to cover 100 miles of distance. But not all of that electricity you draw from the wall electrical outlet actually gets into your car’s battery (some is lost in the charging process). So the efficiency of your car (the amount of electricity it consumes per mile, Wh/m) will be roughly 10-15% better than this EPA-reported number. There are other complicating factors involved because the EPA tests often use more total energy from the battery than its manufacturer specs indicate it contains. None of these technical details alter the main story, and indeed, many cars will themselves report energy efficiency right in the car. Arguably, this enables the geeky “hypermilers” who really do care about efficiency to dive into it, after they’ve bought the car. But for the general public coming to the dealership or the website, that info remains hidden.

9. In the absence of new knowledge (and I’m no expert on car manufacturing), I have to think that this is the primary explanans. The overall logic here chimes significantly with ESG investing, where the important thing is the branding, not what actually goes on in the world.

10. A key turning point was the 1994 hot-coffee lawsuit, in which a McDonald’s customer spilled hot coffee on their lap while stationary in their car, sued, and won $2.7 million. Thereafter, US car-makers shifted from letting cupholders be an aftermarket add-on to including them. Again, fear motivated both car-makers (fear of lawsuits) and consumers (fear of coffee burns). (Credit for everything in this footnote – the research and the writing – goes to Rebecca Brown.)