Quiz update: electric and hybrid cars

After the initial launch of the Planethours quiz back in August 2020, we have received a lot of relevant feedback from the people who took part in it (thank you all! 🙏🏻). The biggest concern that emerged from all these feedback was related to the question about car usage.

The question was as follow:

How often do you travel by car?
- Never
- Occasionally
- Daily

Electric/hybrid car users reasonably considered this a too narrow perspective on the topic, since the question was completely ignoring the car type and only focusing on the frequency of usage.

The reasons why we initially decided to not consider the car type were:

• simplicity
• charging a car might not necessarily be more sustainable if the electricity comes mainly from a coal grid (for instance)

We looked at the literature and we found out that electric cars do have an overall lower impact than the gas/diesel ones, even considering the current average electric grid composition.

Source: https://www.transportenvironment.org/what-we-do/electric-cars/how-clean-are-electric-cars

Given that the majority of our users currently come from the EU, we decided that we could take this estimation for good and use it for our case.

To implement this new feature in the quiz, we calculated a reduction factor for each vehicle type using the data from Alternative Fuels Data Center.

The finalised factors are the following:

• petrol/diesel: 1
• hybrid: 0.525
• electric: 0.35

Example: if you are an occasional electric car user, we would take the estimated CO2 emissions from occasional car usage and multiply it by 0.35.

Give it a try!

One of our goal for this new year is to build a tool that captures the behavioural evolution of the overall population over time, but for this we need more data hence more people taking the survey. Please, help us by spreading the word and sharing the Planethours quiz with your family and friends!

Thanks for reading all the way to here! Cheers🖖🌍