On 14 Jan 2014 at 15:18, Cor van de Water wrote: > this is really a dumb move from EPA (who triggered this?)
Real world speaking : You can't have a law or rule that never has any unintended consequences. If you're going to do some good for some people, you have to accept the negatives for others. And in this case, I suspect that for MOST vehicle buyers, the rule makes sense. A little history here. Plenty of folks have clobbered the EPA over the years for MPG ratings that were either way higher than the real world, or in a few cases, lower. But if you're old enough to recall the wild west days before EPA MPG estimates, you may remember that advertised MPG for ICEs was pretty useless. Nobody EVER got what was advertised. None of the advertised numbers was comparable to any others, too, because every manufacturer used their own method to measure MPG (and some didn't bother measuring it at all). So if MPG mattered to you as a vehicle buyer, you had no real way of comparing one car to another. That's what the EPA set out to fix. Over the years, they've refined their methods. Today I think they probably come closer to what average drivers typically get, though they'll never be perfect. I would have to assume that part of the effort that got them here was figuring in an allowance for any adjustments or settings that might change the MPG of a vehicle. Suppose the car has a performance/economy switch. The Leaf at least has something of the sort, no? (Do any ICEVs have this? Theoretically they could). If EPA test with the switch on Economy, some owner is going to gripe that he didn't get that range (or MPG) with the switch set on Performance, and vice versa. So they have to make allowance for it somehow, no? Maybe they should publish different figures for different switch positions or configuration options. After all, they do that for different engine and transmission combinations in ICEVs. I don't know how far they should go with that, though. The tables could get pretty confusing after a while. The way they do it now does have unintended consequences, as we're seeing here. This is not the first time. Remember when Toyota left the "EV" button off their US-market 2005-2009 Prius models? That was because it would have caused problems with the EPA MPG tests. Who was to blame for that, Toyota or the EPA? Both equally? That depends on how you view it. The same is true here. However, from what I can tell, Nissan did this solely to get better range numbers. You may disagree, and I would never say the EPA is perfect or blameless, but here I'm more inclined to lay the cause mostly at Nissan's feet rather than the EPAs. David Roden - Akron, Ohio, USA EVDL Administrator = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = EVDL Information: http://www.evdl.org/help/ = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = Note: mail sent to "evpost" and "etpost" addresses will not reach me. To send a private message, please obtain my email address from the webpage http://www.evdl.org/help/ . = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = _______________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE: http://www.evdl.org/help/index.html#usub http://lists.evdl.org/listinfo.cgi/ev-evdl.org For EV drag racing discussion, please use NEDRA (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NEDRA)
