Cold Weather Fuel Efficiency : Electric Versus Gasoline Showdown

January 16, 2014

Update: We’ve updated the labeling on the graphic included, another thank you to some eagle eyed commenters!

When we released real-world data showing how the ranges of Chevrolet Volts and Nissan Leafs changed with plummeting temperatures we wanted to show not just overall trends, but how much variation existed from trip to trip.

This time we took it a few steps further. With this infographic, our analysis focuses not on the differences within electric vehicle models, but the differences between electric and gasoline vehicles as temperatures drop. We looked through FleetCarma’s real world database to find how much the fuel economy of each vehicle changes at and below freezing temperatures.It is important to note that the specific numbers used in the infographic below represent aggregates, the specific sensitivity of an individual make or model will vary heavily for electric vehicles. Different electric vehicle models will use dramatically different power loads. A topic we’re going to cover more next week.

As shown in the infographic we can see that the key take-away from comparisons like this is that while the factors that cause the range of a vehicle to shrink differ between electric and gas vehicles, when the costs are analyzed on a cost-per-mile basis the savings improve at lower temperatures.