| The early days of any new technology tend to be — to put it technically — insane. Airlines in the 1960s, PCs in the 1980s, iPhone apps in the 2000s. Their origin stories all are similar: there's a crush of new product, a marketing dash for FOMO-motivated customers and piles of money to burn as companies buy into the new game. The US electric car market right now is no exception. And that's where Bloomberg Green's Electric Car Ratings come in. In an effort to make sense of this mad market — to catalogue in close-to-real-time every one of the EVs on offer at the moment — we've produced a rating of electric cars. The dashboard covers every new fully battery-powered vehicle available for sale in the US, calling out metrics from price and range to charging speed and number of seats. Electric cars are drastically cleaner than conventional gasoline vehicles, particularly as renewable power starts to comprise more of the grid. However, there's a growing awareness that none of this 5,000-pound hardware comes without a carbon cost; there's no such thing as a "zero-emission vehicle," as they have been branded by policymakers and early champions. Steel body panels don't grow on trees. Lithium doesn't just flow out of the ground and into battery plants. And electricity — even the stuff coming from solar panels — isn't captured without a great deal of capital and carbon expense. That's why our EV ratings also measure how "green" each of these machines is with a formula based on the economy of the vehicle, how far it travels relative to how many pounds it weighs, and the size of its battery. The economy part of the equation is weighted at 70% of the score, which is roughly equivalent to the amount of an EV's emissions that come from driving. The remainder of an EV's carbon footprint comes from its manufacturing, especially the construction of the battery. Thus, in our model, battery size serves as a proxy for all manufacturing impacts and is weighted at 30%. How we arrived at these decisions and some additional context is spelled out at length in our methodology. - Want to lead a more climate-conscious life? Bloomberg Green wants to answer your questions. Take our brief survey and tell us what you'd like to know.
It will come as no surprise that among the models currently on the dashboard — which will be updated when new models are introduced and key metrics change — Elon Musk has bragging rights. Tesla's Model 3 Long Range tops the list of green machines. It travels up to 358 miles at a time, thanks in part to an aerodynamic design and software meant to squeeze every last electron from a medium-sized battery. GMC's Hummer EV brings up the rear with its massive battery and a chassis geared for off-road brawn rather than on-road economy.  When Nissan introduced the Leaf in 2010, an electric car was a small, funky looking hatchback, short on range and long on virtue signaling. Over the following decade, Tesla made them into sporty status symbols. Now the legacy automakers have begun churning out pickups and SUVs every bit as powerful as their combustion engine predecessors, and far quicker. These are finally no-compromise vehicles and convincing consumers to buy them is a critical step in the climate fight. The next impactful step, perhaps 10 years from now, will be convincing them to buy only as many EVs as they really need. The car market may never be this crazy and confusing again. This is our attempt to make sense of it. If you are shopping for a new ride, investing in these companies or are just among the increasing crowd of the EV-curious, come back here anytime to see how the race is shaping up and, of course, which machine is out front. Like getting the Green Daily newsletter? Subscribe to Bloomberg.com for unlimited access to breaking news on climate and energy, data-driven reporting and graphics, Bloomberg Green magazine and more. You can read today's newsletter on the web here. | 
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