EU fuel economy numbers proven worthless

13. december, the Norwegian newspaper Verdens Gang (VG) printed an article about misleading fuel consumption numbers.

The largest car leasing company in Norway, Leaseplan, tested twenty of their most popular models for VG. At least tens of cars of each model were tested and each car was driven for at least 5000 km and for a period of at least five months, so at least two hundred drivers were involved and at least one million km were driven.

Not a single model was better than claimed. None managed less than 5 l. Particularly low emissions cars exceed the advertised emissions numbers by a large amount, up to 53%. The 75 hp Polo actually used more fuel than the 105 hp Golf. These misleading numbers are the ones used when the anti EV lobby "prove" that EVs are more polluting than ICEVs (in addition to a whole host of other lies, of course).

Model: Claimed (l/100km), Actual (l/100km), difference

Volkswagen Polo 1.2 l, 75 hp, 5 door, diesel: 3.4, 5.2, 53%
Volvo V60 1.6 l DRIVe, 115 hp, diesel: 4.5, 6.7, 49%
Toyota Auris 1.8 Hybrid, gasoline: 3.8, 5.5, 45%

The full list can be found here.

The full article can be found here (in Norwegian).

dpeilow: I've been saying it too, I knew that the numbers are very optimistic based on my own driving.

During long distance driving my ICEV is spot on, I can even beat the advertised numbers (6l, I've managed 5.4). But during daily driving in Oslo throughout a whole year, in traffic and varying weather, I couldn't get it below 10 l per 100 km on average. I measured all power used to charge my EV for a whole year too, 11500 km. I paid NOK 1043, which is approximately USD 175. It was driven almost exclusively in heavy traffic. Energy consumption worked out to the equivalent of 1.8 l per 100 km, plus about 25 l of diesel for the heater. EVs are almost immune to cold weather and traffic, and this is never accounted for.

What I didn't know is that the much touted recent fuel economy improvements are mostly due to optimization to the test cycle and disappear in the real world. My ICEV is 10 years old and probably not optimized in this way, and this test shows that the situation is even worse now than it used to be.

Anyway, it's going to be nice to be able to point people to this article when they claim that the modern ICE is so incredibly efficient that EV's aren't needed.

Alan: That might be a factor, but on the other hand, these aren't exactly driver's cars... People buy/lease these cars to get from A to B. I would think that 10+ different cars with different drivers and 5 months and 5k km per driver would give a fairly accurate average. I have just asked the journalist who paid for the fuel, but I doubt it would make much of a difference - in my experience, most people don't care sufficiently about fuel costs to really strive to drive economically.