Earth’s EV Fleet Has Sped Past Saturn (CleanTechnica Exclusive)

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EV drivers sped past a big milestone recently, surpassing two billion electric kilometres in their plug-in vehicles. That’s 2,000,000,000 km – or about 1,250,000,000 miles. And that’s just the Nissan Leaf and Tesla owners, and the electric-only km’s / miles covered by Chevy Volt drivers.

When we factor in the electric distances travelled by plug-ins from BYD (210 million km / 130 million miles), Mitsubishi, Toyota, Ford, Renault, and others, we could well be approaching 2.5 billion km (1.5 billion miles).

Which is all fine and good, except that most of us have no earthly idea what those kinds of distances look like!

So we turned to the skies.

EV solar system
click to embiggen

If we were set out on a cross-countrycosmos road trip, two billion kilometres would get us well past Saturn – about halfway between Saturn and Uranus, in fact. And that’s pretty cool.

On an individual vehicle level, Leaf and Volt drivers are running pretty much neck and neck, having collectively covered almost 800 million km (500 million miles) apiece. That’s enough for both of them to have rounded Jupiter. Tesla drivers aren’t that far behind, having covered roughly 500 million km (350 million) in their Roadsters and Model S’s. That’s more than far enough to “occupy Mars,” and puts them on the outer edge of the Asteroid Belt, en route to Jupiter.

We’ll be trying to uncover more plug-in travel stats in the coming months, and we’ll post an update when the Earth’s EV fleet reaches Uranus, the seventh planet, at roughly the 2.8 billion km (1.75 billion mile) mark.


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Matthew Klippenstein

Matthew Klippenstein is a renewable energy consultant in Vancouver, Canada. He has chronicled the Canadian electric car market for GreenCarReports.com since 2013, and has provided commentary (in English and French) for print, television, radio, web and podcast media. An early guest on "The Energy Transition Show", his work has also been discussed on "The Energy Gang".

Matthew Klippenstein has 37 posts and counting. See all posts by Matthew Klippenstein