The Lordstown Endurance Electric Pickup Got An Abysmal Range Rating But The EPA Label Makes No Sense

EPA figures are out for the Lordstown Endurance electric pickup truck and they aren’t good. This crew cab behemoth is rated for a range of just 174 miles. For those keeping track at home, that’s just 25 miles more range than a base-model Nissan Leaf and 56 miles less range than a base Ford F-150 Lightning. To make matters worse, the truck achieves the worst MPGe of any 2023 model year EV rated by the EPA at just 48 MPGe combined. However, delve a little deeper into the numbers and nothing on the Endurance pickup’s EPA label makes sense at all. What’s going on? Let’s talk about it.

Let’s start with the most confusing metric — MPGe. This odd initialism stands for Miles Per Gallon equivalent, but what does that even mean? Basically, it’s how many miles an EV can travel on 37.7 kWh of electricity, or the same energy found in a gallon of gasoline. While this is a useful way to compare EVs to gasoline-powered vehicles, it doesn’t feel particularly useful in the parlance of EV use. Very rarely will EV owners use precisely 37.7 kWh of electricity, and charging stations certainly don’t use 37.7 kWh as a base unit. In pretty much every EV’s trip computer, energy consumption is displayed as either mi/kWh or kWh/100 mi, and that latter unit makes its way onto EPA labelling, too.

Below is the EPA fuel economy label for the Lordstown Endurance, alongside labels for the Ford F-150 Lightning with the standard range battery pack and the Rivian R1T on 22-inch wheels. Look closely and you’ll notice kWh/100 mi printed in tiny font below the MPGe figures. However, something feels off — if the Lordstown Endurance gets substantially worse MPGe than the F-150 Lightning and the Rivian R1T, why is its kWh/100 mi figure nearly identical to those of established competitors?

More Efficient Than The Competition, But Also Less Efficient???

If you look at the Ford F-150 Lightning and Rivian R1T’s 49 kWh/100mi rating, that’s actually worse than the Lordstown Endurance’s figure. So if the Endurance needs less energy (in kWh) to travel 100 miles, then how can it also require more energy (in units of 33.7 kWh) to travel 100 miles? It makes no sense.

Plus, if the 48 kWh/100mi figure is right, then — knowing that the Lordstown Endurance’s 109 kWh battery pack is bigger than that of the F-150 Lightning’s 98 kWh unit — then shouldn’t it offer more range than the 49 kWh/100mi F-150 Lightning?  You’d think so. Lordstown hasn’t disclosed whether that 109 kWh is gross capacity or net usable capacity, but that wouldn’t account for a range that much worse than the F-150 Lightning’s.

This whole thing is confusing. Why does the Lordstown Endurance have such a bad MPGe rating when its kWh/100 mi rating is better than that of its competitors? If we back-calculate, 48 MPGe combined works out to 70.22 kWh/100 mi, which is much higher (worse) than the 48 kWh/100 mi rating on that same EPA label.  What’s wild is that, in accordance with EPA procedure, after a correction factor is applied to laboratory testing to calculate MPGe, that MPGe figure is then converted back to kWh/100 mi for the official kWh/100 mi rating. Clearly, something is very wrong here, because if the figures for MPGe and kWh/100 mi were both accurate, they’d be incredibly close to each other.

Want proof? Let’s take a look at the 68 MPGe and 49 kWh/100 mi figures achieved by a familiar face, the Ford F-150 Lightning with the standard range battery pack.

If we do the math, 68 MPGe combined works out to 495.7 Wh/mi, or 49.57 kWh/100 mi, pretty dang close to the Lightning’s official rating of 49 kWh/100 mi. The exact same figures and calculations apply to the Rivian R1T we compared the Lordstown Endurance to earlier, which gets 68 MPGe combined, or 49.57 kWh/100 mi, which is very close to its official rating of 49 kWh/100 mi.

What if we run the same calculations on a completely different sort of EV? Behold, the current MPGe king, the Hyundai Ioniq 6 Long Range RWD on 18-inch wheels. It’s officially rated for 140 MPGe combined and 24 kWh/100 mi, so let’s convert out the MPGe and see if it comes anywhere close. Running the calculations, 140 MPGe works out to 240.8 Wh/mi, or 24.08 kWh/100 mi. That’s a nigh-on perfect match for the official 24 kWh/100 mi figure — within a tenth of a kilowatt. So why don’t the numbers add up for the Lordstown Endurance? Put simply, we don’t know, and taking a look at total range and advertised battery capacity doesn’t clear anything up.

Well The Poor Range Figure Probably Lines Up With The Poor MPGe Figure, Right?

Lordstown claims that the Endurance features a 109 kWh battery pack, although a request for clarification on whether that’s a gross figure or a net usable capacity figure has gone unanswered. Out of curiosity, I wondered if taking that battery size and dividing it by the 174 mile range figure, I’d end up with such a terrible efficiency as the one indicated by the 48 MPGe (which is equivalent to 70.2 mi/100kWh).

If we go by the advertised figure, 109 kWh divided by 174 miles of range, that comes out to 62.64 kWh/100 mi. That’s not 70.2, however, that’s not apples-to-apples because the EPA calculations for advertised electric vehicle range are different than the calculations used for MPGe and kWh/100 mi. Here’s what the agency has to say:

In contrast to the MPGe and kW-hr/100 miles calculations, the EPA estimated range calculation is based on the Direct Current (DC) useable battery energy available from full charge. Going back to the hypothetical 100 kW-hr battery pack, the 100 kW-hrs would be the metric used. This makes sense due to that a given vehicle charged to 100% is able to travel only as far as the available battery energy allows for.

The EPA claims average AC charging losses of 10 percent, so if we multiply our previous kWh figure by 1.1, we end up with 68.9 kWh/100 mi. That’s still not quite equivalent to the 70.2 kWh/100 mi calculated using the MPGe and certainly not the 48 kWh/100 mi claimed by the EPA, and although it may be much closer to the former than the latter, it’s not close enough to draw any conclusions from since only Lordstown knows if the 109 kWh battery capacity is a gross figure or a net usable figure.

We Reached Out To The EPA

I really don’t know what is going on here. I figured maybe the discrepancies somehow have to do with charging losses. Electric vehicles suffer from charging losses a bit like how a car with a leaky fuel tank can spit out a gallon or two while filling up. Not all the electricity coming out of the mains goes into the battery pack, especially when charging on alternating current. When charging from a 120-volt or 240-volt AC charger, an EV has to transform AC current into DC current. Then there may be losses caused by keeping the battery pack at an ideal temperature for efficient charging, losses through heat, and losses through transmission.

However, the reality is that the losses certainly play no role in the discrepancy between MPGe and kWh/100 mi you see here because those figures are calculated using identical procedures. I reached out to the EPA for an official statement on these testing procedures, and received a response:

For MPGe and consumption in kW-hr/100 miles, the energy used to recharge the vehicle from full depletion (~0% State-of-charge [SOC]) to full charge (~100% SOC), in Alternating Current (AC) kW-hours, is used as the basis for calculations due to that this is the energy that is being consumed out of the outlet to charge the vehicle. Vehicles have different charging efficiencies often due to on-board chargers, inverters and software differences.  For example, a hypothetical vehicle could have a battery with 100 kW-hrs of useable battery energy, but require 111 kW-hr of AC recharge energy to charge the battery completely (90% charging efficiency).

So what figures are Lordstown using? As it sits, the official tech sheet for the Lordstown Endurance repeats the EPA figures of 48 MPGe and 174 miles of range, but that 48 kWh/100 mi figure seen on the EPA’s website is nowhere to be found.

So where does that leave us? Well, we can say that something on the EPA sticker for the Lordstown Endurance may be incorrect, be it the MPGe rating (which seems about right) or the kWh/100 mi rating (which seems absurdly low) [Editor’s Note: You might conclude that the MPGe figures are wrong since they’re so far off of the competitive set, but how could Lordstown get both the city and highway MPGe measurements wrong? It seems so unlikely. -DT]. We can see that the delta between these two figures (when normalized to kWh/100mi) is far greater than that on established EVs, and that due to identical calculation methods, this shouldn’t be the case. As a result, we’re left with two important questions: Is the efficiency data for the Lordstown Endurance inaccurate, and if it might be, how could potentially inaccurate data have made it past the EPA?

(Photo credits: Lordstown Motors, Ford, EPA)

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