Efficiency of Electric Cars

Electric vehicles are known to be very efficient. Cars with internal combustion engines are not, losing most of their energy as heat. EV advocates have been saying this for years, and there is a ton of data about the efficiency of gasoline and diesel cars. But electric cars are newer and there are few of them, so we've had less documentation...until now. Some Belgians have been given the opportunity to study a fleet of five cars.

There were Peugeot Ion models, exact clones of the Mitsubishi i-MiEV (European version), and the people monitoring them were from Laborelec, with support from Brussels' Vrije University, which has a facility dedicated to automotive technology. The study was funded by Electrabel, the Belgian utility. It lasted two years, but the first part of the story was to define a methodology. A precise, dedicated monitoring system was developed, and things only got started when it received a full approval from the car manufacturer.