electricity / kWh fuel type

[kal]

There's no kWh option for fuel quantity, so I can't add data for my electric car.
It would be simple to add, wouldn't it?

[pb]

That's something we're considering, but no it's not an easy thing to add. Our site is designed to help you calculate Miles/Gallon. A gallon is a liquid fuel with a certain volume. So it's fairly easy to translate between other liquid fuel measurements such as litres. But how does a kilowatt per hour translate into a litre? I'm not sure there's an obvious answer or an accepted standard of translation. If there is, please let me know.

Without being able to come up with MPG or L/100km for a vehicle, how do we compare it with other vehicles? How are other services like ours tackling this problem? Is the EPA tracking electric vehicles in the same way? I don't think these are easy questions to answer.

[vr4Legacy]

One solution that may work would to simply calculate Miles per kWh and don't translate it to MPG or L/100km , as there really isn't any correalation.

Of course one could do that on their own, and just read their data and know it is calculating MPkWh instead of MPG.

In the end a gallon is simply a unit of measurment used to base an average off of, fortunately you can use standard calculations to convert it to metric systems, whereas it is not related to kWh.

[kal]

Personally I think MPG or L for an electric vehicle is meaningless and confusing, so I hope you don't do it that way

A gallon of fuel has a certain volume but the density of it changes with temperature, and the energy it contains varies according to the refinery processes and summer/winter blends, addition of biofuels, whether it's petrol or diesel or LPG, etc etc. So it's actually a pretty unprecise measure.

A kWh is a kWh, a precise, unvarying unit of energy. You'd actually be better off converting all the liquid fuel quantities into average kWh values (a litre of petrol is about somewhere around 11kWh IIRC).

Anyway, I don't see the issue with reporting kWh per mile - most EVs do between 0.2 and 0.5 (or 200 and 500Wh/mile)

Hope this helps.

[pb]

Anyway, I don't see the issue with reporting kWh per mile...

Yeah, I'm sorry the site isn't designed to report that. We're set up to share and compare MPG. kWh/mile doesn't fit in with that scheme, and we're not going to completely reshape the site for a couple of vehicles. At our current moment in history people use MPG to compare the fuel economy of vehicles, so we're going to stick with that.