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by slg 2623 days ago
>but The Drive's counter-argument makes an apples vs. oranges comparison.

I will go one step further, The Drive's number is just straight dishonest. It lists that number as "the average fuel economy of all vehicles in the US hit 24.9 MPG in 2017". If you click through to the EPA report it list that 24.9 number as for "all new vehicles". It also says the number was 23.6 in 2012. The average car on the road is roughly 10 years old so that 23.6 number is still too modern to apply to "all vehicles in the US". So if you subtract non-ICE vehicles and factor in that MPG has been improving, the 22 MPG number from the original report seems perfectly reasonable.
2 comments
7e 2623 days ago
It's fair to compare Tesla's new cars with others' new cars. That's the benchmark. If someone didn't buy a Tesla, they would have bought another type of new car (though probably a new hybrid or plug in hybrid, which have even higher average MPG). Tesla is disingenuous here.
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slg 2623 days ago
Except they aren’t comparing their cars. They are trying to quantify the total carbon saved from their cars and other ventures like solar panels. People have no idea what a “ton of carbon” equates to, but saying it is the equivalent of taking 500k cars off the road is meaningful to the general population.
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TheSpiceIsLife 2623 days ago
People have no idea what a “ton of carbon” equates to, but saying it is the equivalent of taking 500k cars off the road is meaningful to the general population.

Is this meant to be an off the cuff remark, or is a ton of carbon and 500,000 cars meaningfully linked?

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slg 2623 days ago
Thanks for pointing that out, I definitely phrased that poorly. The report said they saved "four million tons of carbon" and they equated that to "saving emissions from being released into the environment from over 500K ICE vehicles". They are basically converting one unit that is hard to understand "one ton of carbon" to a unit that people can relate to in "one ICE vehicle".
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exolymph 2623 days ago
The writer probably fucked up, I doubt that it was intentional.

(Is that worse or better? Worse, because lying on purpose would be more obvious, even without fact-checking. Well, that's the hope — can't say for sure...)

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