Don't use your car to charge your smartphone

[supton]

Charging a smartphone while driving isn't as free as you think

Quote:
That’s because a phone drawing electricity from a USB port cuts 0.03 miles from each gallon of gasoline in a tank. Across the fleet of vehicles in the U.S., that would mean about 970,000 tons of extra planet-warming carbon dioxide a year...

Quote:
The estimated extra CO2 created by plugging in one phone in every car in the U.S. would be about the same as that produced by 185,257 passenger vehicles in one year, according to an Environmental Protection Agency website that converts greenhouse gas into real-world equivalents. Put another way, that’s the pollution created by burning 945 million pounds of coal.

By far, the cheapest way to charge a smartphone is at home, Bereisa said. With gasoline at $2 a gallon, it costs about 2 cents an hour to charge a phone in a car compared with about 0.06 cent at home, or 33 times less. Gasoline would have to fall to 6 cents a gallon to compete with home electricity, he said. It would also produce about half the carbon dioxide.

 

[bdcardinal]

The trade-off is worth it to me.

 

[Blueskies123]

Does not sound reasonable. Sounds like something on Snopes. If that is the case I wonder how much using headlights or the defrost would hurt gas mileage?

 

[racin4ds]

Sorry... not buying that at all!

 

[wemay]

...and only use your lights when you THINK there's an obstacle in the road. just saying.

 

[901Memphis]

Okay so I guess I shouldn't idle my car for total of an hour on breaks each day at work either while I'm watching Netflix on my phone?

 

[tig1]

Think that's bad, AC is much worse.

 

[itguy08]

Holy nonsense Batman. Over 95k I've never noticed any MPG gains/losses/etc in the various seasons, especially spring vs summer and fall vs winter when you are less likely to use the power draws of heated/cooled seats, heater, AC, etc.

Think about the savings if we never ran the heater/AC, heated seats, stereo, wipers, defrost, etc. You could probably get paid to drive your car!

IMHO it's like the nonsense tankless water heater "savings" where they claim something like $30/mo gas savings. Our gas bill in the summer is $30 (we have a gas dryer, stove, grill, heater, and water heater) so I'd get free use! NOT!

 

[hatt]

Originally Posted By: wemay
...and only use your lights when you THINK there's an obstacle in the road. just saying.
I wonder when the ban on DRL will be introduced.

 

[supton]

I'm actually not that surprised. I mean, ICE is what, low 20% efficient, at low loading? Hit that with 80% efficient conversion of mechanical energy to electrical, and yeah sure, you can make it sound really good to stuff any car full of batteries so as to disable the alternator.

But 0.03mpg is too small to measure for the average person! Straight up numbers crunching. Which tap danced around the real elephant in the room, if they really want to go down that path: everything else in the car that runs on electricity but which isn't "strictly needed" (radio, seat heaters, etc).

 

[rslifkin]

It definitely will cost some mpg, but even 0.03 mpg sounds way too high, unless we're talking about a car that's insanely efficient and getting 100 mpg.

We'll put it this way: charging your phone will have somewhere between 5 - 10% of the power consumption of turning on the headlights (low beam). Turning off the stereo and/or heat would also save more power than the phone is drawing. And that doesn't even bring A/C into the equation, which is a worse penalty than any of those...

So in the grand scheme of things, it's so irrelevant that anyone who worries about it is an idiot, IMO.

 

[CarbonSteel]

Originally Posted By: racin4ds
Sorry... not buying that at all!
Agreed! In fact, with the move to more and more LED lights in vehicles, this energy "cost" would be a wash or slightly in the other direction. Must be a boring news day on Bloomberg.

 

[KrisZ]

We have a pretty strong elninio this year so of course the GW/Climate change crowd is coming out of the woodwork as usual.

What's next? Breathing is bad for the environment as well? Perhaps they should do a calculation on how much more CO2 a person that is exercising is emitting vs one that sits in front of a TV.

 

[jeepman3071]

When you have to dial 911 but can't because your phone is dead, that .003 mpg or whatever it is doesn't seem to matter anymore. Whoever wrote that article should be slapped in the head. Really? .003 mpg? My mpg varies every day depending on how much traffic I sit in and you don't see anyone doing anything about that.

 

[hattaresguy]

That's a bunch of [censored], the load on an alternator for something super low voltage like a phone is just negligible.


Now idling the car just to charge your phone because you have a bad battery, that is wasteful of fuel.

 

[Dave Sherman]

Considering how much MPG can vary, that sounds like a pretty negligible figure. I had thought that was a huge amount of change for a cell phone, though I think I arrived at the same figure when I plugged some numbers.

Cell phone takes 2 amps at 5 volts at the most. If you're using an inefficient linear voltage regulator in the charger, 2 amps at 14.6 volts means the charger and phone are taking 29 watts. At cruising speed, the engine is not delivering full power. Maybe 30 HP to keep cruising (somebody feel free to provide an accurate figure). 30 HP would be 22,380 watts. add 29 watts to that, and it's an increase of 0.13%. For a vehicle that gets 25 MPG on the highway, that would be a change of... 0.032 MPG.

Considering the stereo, the headlights, defroster, air conditioning, and other accessories take more than 29 watts, I'm not losing sleep over it. Also consider that switching regulators are much more efficient, so even 29 watts would be a pretty large figure.

 

[kschachn]

Originally Posted By: wemay
...and only use your lights when you THINK there's an obstacle in the road. just saying.


Haha best suggestion yet.

 

[Dyusik]

According to this logic the holocaust was a good thing. Vegetarian and vegan people are criminal for not eating CO2 producing animals. Volcanoes will destroy the world if we don't put them out immediately.
Any other load?
I use far more electricity at home since the charger draws power 24/7 vs using the car charger for under an hour.

 

[gfh77665]

Originally Posted By: racin4ds
Sorry... not buying that at all!


Its just GOTTA be true, I tell 'ya!

Its on the internet!!!!

 

[Nate1979]

Is the alternator putting out a certain amount of current and whatever device or equipment in your car will take it or will the plugged in equipment cause the alternator to increase the output and therefore put a small amount of load on the engine? In other words if you are going down the road at a constant speed and rpm is the alternator outputting more amps than your car needs or just what it needs and thus if you plug your phone in it puts a little bit more load on the engine?