The Chevy Volt is as much of an electric car as you want to be, and some Volt enthusiasts have gone more than 2,300 miles on a single gallon of gasoline. Yet a new report suggests that some other Chevy Volts, most notably those owned by private and/or public vehicle fleets, aren’t doing much electric driving.
Green Car Reports recently followed up on a report by InsideEVs to see why a big batch of high-mileage Chevy Volts had such low average MPG numbers. The problem it seems is that fleet managers aren’t incentivizing efficient driving, and until they do, we can only expect more of the same.
Many fleets operate by paying drivers on a per-mile basis. People who drive a lot for a living are then compensated on cumulative gasoline costs…but they aren’t recouped for the much-lower costs incurred by plugging into an outlet or charging station. The result is that many fleets of Chevy Volts are coming in with an average of between 34 and 39 MPG, whereas many non-fleet owners regular achieve over 450 miles to a gallon of gas, as long as they recharge regularly. The savings add up too; to charge a Chevy Volt costs about $1.50 in electricity, and it nominally covers the cost of a gallon of gasoline, which depending on where you live is between $3.00 and $4.00 a gallon.
How can we change this? That’s a sticky question, as people still need to feel fairly compensated for the costs of driving. One suggestion would be to offer a substantial “savings bonus” to whomever used the least amount of fuel in a given time period. The bonus would have to be large enough to incentivize people to go a little bit out of their way to find EV charging stations or other places to plug in, but the cost savings to the parent company could be huge. It’s just a matter of incentivizing employees to do the right thing.
Source: Gas 2.
