Electric Car Mysteries

“People thinking about buying an electric car or a plug-in hybrid are being left in the dark. ‘There’s a lot of obfuscation,’ says Dan Edmunds, director of vehicle testing at (no relation) Edmunds.com, an independent car-pricing and evaluation group based in Santa Monica, California. ‘Because of charging losses, you don’t know how much electricity you are actually putting into the battery,’ he notes. Nor do you really know how much of the battery’s rated capacity (24 kilowatt-hours for the Leaf) is useable. ‘That’s a trade secret,’ says a frustrated Mr Edmunds.”