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Dishonest Consulting Firm and Disinfo Media Attack EVs Because Gas Prices Finally Dropped [1]

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Date: 2023-02-01  

According to a (faulty) new "study" comparing the cost of driving electric vehicles (EVs) with that of gassing up an old-fashioned car, EVs were cheaper for 18 straight months, from Q2 of 2021 to Q3 of 2022. But in Q4 of 2022, gas prices had dropped and electricity prices had risen enough based on the high prices of another fossil fuel – methane gas – that gasoline was (barely) cheaper.

This recent reversal was, to the oh-so-ethical "journalists" at the Washington Examiner, worth writing up with the headline, " Electric vehicles now cost more to fuel than gas-powered cars: Study. " (Oddly, we can't seem to find any stories about how EVs were cheaper than gas cars for over a year as the fossil fuel industry profiteered off energy and economic fallout of the Russian invasion of Ukraine…)

Apparently it's very big news that the consulting firm Anderson Economic Group (AEG) found that "the shift in costs gave gas-powered drivers a leg up on savings for the first time in 18 months."

But before you rush to trade in your plug-in for a petrol, it might be wise to do a bit of due diligence on AEG and this "new study."

As it turns out, this "study" isn't worth the three pieces of paper you could print it out on for the express purpose of dramatically crumpling up and throwing it in the trash.

For starters, it's not a study. It's little more than a pair of graphs, one showing the cost of fueling over time and the other comparing EVs and gas car costs, just in Q4 of 2022.

When you actually look at these figures, you wind up with more questions than answers. For starters, why in the world does the graph assume anyone is "mostly" charging their car commercially, as opposed to at home? And why does the analysis ignore entry-priced EVs all together, simply averaging together mid-priced and luxury cars as well as home and commercially-charged vehicles, when luxury EVs are still decidedly cheaper than gas ones and when the home-charged mid-priced EVs cost just pennies more than their polluting competition?

Hard to say, but it might be easier to figure out these mysteries when you realize that this isn't the first time AEG has released a sloppy hit piece on EVs.

Back in October of 2021 , a point at which AEG’s current analysis shows home-charged EVs to be cheaper than gassing up, AEG snagged some headlines from legitimate press with a claim that EVs are more expensive to fuel than gas cars.

But as Sebastian Blanco pointed out in Car and Driver , AEG's approach was not "honest and realistic" about how people charge their EVs. For starters, basically no one relies on commercial chargers instead of their home ones for the bulk of their charging, so that inclusion itself is a convenient way to skew the results. On top of that, AEG assumed people spend 5 minutes simply plugging in their EV and then unplugging it every time they charge it, which adds up to hours every month, which, when multiplied by what someone who makes $70,000/year would be worth(!), unfairly inflates EV costs.

As a result of this"less than honorable methodology," as Blanco put it, AEG was able to make EVs seem more expensive to fuel than they really are, with gas cars seeming comparatively cheaper.

Fortunately, though, real media outlets appear to have learned from the last time AEG made this claim, detouring around this latest attempt at an EV hit piece.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/1/2150489/-Dishonest-Consulting-Firm-and-Disinfo-Media-Attack-EVs-Because-Gas-Prices-Finally-Dropped

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