Renewable Revolution

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October 27, 2021


Last week, the Detroit Free Press covered a report from 🐍 Anderson Economic Group that claims that gassing up a traditional car is cheaper than recharging an electric one, based on its CEO Patrick Anderson’s experience with the electric Porsche Taycan he bought.
If it seems odd for an economic report to rely on the anecdotal experience of one (1) CEO to provide what it claims to be “real world” costs, never fear, the report also relies on such reputable sources as online forums like Reddit, where people who have trouble will complain and those having a fine time are nowhere to be seen (and therefore are excluded from the study). 

Safe to say then, there are some red flags with the report. In fact, there were so many that the Detroit Free Press did a follow-up piece responding to readers' questions, acknowledging that the report “is an outlier” and that “many studies show the opposite to be true,” like Consumer Reports’ comparison showing EVs saved owners $6,000-$10,000 over a vehicle’s lifetime. 
And to be fair, the original Free Press story did note that the 🦖 Anderson report “differs from some reports that show it’s cheaper to drive an EV than a conventional car,” like “a 2018 study from the University of Michigan's Transportation Research Institute [which] found the average cost to operate an EV in the U.S. was $485 per year compared with a gasoline-powered vehicle at $1,117.” 

It was Sebastian Blanco 👍  at Car and Driver, however, who really dissected the Anderson report and found it was little more than “an exercise in finding convenient ways to minimize the benefits and highlight the negatives” of electric vehicles. 

“While the study authors did point out a fair number of legitimate factors that make charging EVs more time-consuming than getting gas for your car,” the introduction explains, “what they did not do was publish an honest and realistic look at how easy it is to charge up for some people.” 

Because yes, charging a car does take longer than filling it up with gasoline. But the deceptions are deep and numerous. For example, the refueling comparison looks at entry-level, mid-priced, and luxury gas cars, and mid-priced, luxury, and luxury EVs. Yes, the report includes figures for two different luxury EVs, and a mid-priced one, but no entry-level EV to compare to the entry-level gas car. “In other words,” Blanco writes, “any cost benefit from buying an entry-level EV is missing” all together. Turns out luxury goods cost more! What helpful analysis!

And it doesn’t get any better from there. For some reason, the report from the Anderson Group “assumes people with home chargers,” Blanco explains, “actually conduct 40 percent of their charges at a public, commercial station. This, then, allows the study to claim that they spend 4.5 hours a month charging their car,” instead of the 75 minutes a month someone who actually mostly charges at home would spend waiting at public chargers when out and about. 

That issue of home vs public charging provides “another example of the study's less than honorable methodology,” Blanco writes, because it first assumes that the person charging has a $70,000 salary- well over the national average of $55,000. It then uses that figure as the basis to “calculate the dollar cost of the extra time it takes an EV driver” to fuel up, and adds that to the cost tally. 

Though yes, you should value your time just like a CEO like 🐷 Anderson apparently does, but assuming people’s time spent getting snacks and going to the bathroom while their vehicle charges is as valuable as the time they spent doing their job ostensibly producing some good or providing some service was a cheap way to add costs to the EV ownership column. 

And it gets worse! The report acknowledges that free public chargers exist, but because someone has to pay for that energy, they simply count that charger use as being the same price as commercial rates. But if you’re including costs the public pays, why not include the benefits the public reaps from the reduced pollution? “It feels disingenuous not to at least address the topic,” Blanco writes, because “it’s not like no one has tried to calculate the different emissions,” for example pointing to “Polestar's recent life-cycle analysis.” 

That’s not even all of the biases and assumptions built into the analysis that Patrick Anderson told the Detroit Free Press was “apples to apples,” but it’s clear that comparing other EV reports to this one is a matter of comparing real experts’ apples to 🐍 Anderson’s lemon of a report.