Your vote: Should new car fuel economy labels include letter grades?

Today the government proposed new fuel economy labels for the 2012 model year that will accommodate electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. There are two different proposals being offered to the public for consideration before about Nov. 1.

The proposal comes in response to a demand for new fuel economy labels from Congress that requires new labels to take into account greenhouse gas emissions and fuel costs, not just miles per gallon. It also comes in the nick of time for the first new electric cars to hit the market late this fall, the Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt. (Read: "Here come the electric cars: Chevrolet Volt, Nissan Leaf and more.")

"This is the first overhaul of the fuel economy labels in 30 years," says David Strickland, administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). "This update is long overdue." NHTSA developed the proposals in conjunction with the Environmental Protection Agency.

The new labels are published on the EPA and the NHTSA websites. And the official Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (PDF), lists a letter grade for every car currently sold.

Option 2: Without letters

One set of labels includes a letter grade for each vehicle based on a Bell curve, just like you received in school. The other omits the letter grade and focuses on each vehicle's predicted annual fuel cost (also included in the other label) rather than a comparison with other vehicles.

Visit the EPA site to submit a comment or vote for your favorite label. And share your thoughts on these choices below.

Both labeling strategies shift from measuring fuel economy in terms of miles per gallon to energy consumption. We think  distance traveled per unit of energy consumed, provides a better comparison between vehicles. (Read "Not all mpg's are created equal.")

The new stickers are designed to preclude the confusion that led General Motors to announce the extended-range Volt's fuel economy as 230-mpg last year. The company used a calculation that didn't count the electricity the car consumed and used a composite average driver who hardly ever filled up with gasoline. Nissan quickly countered with a claim of 327 mpg for the Leaf, which in fact uses no gasoline at all. At best, these claims are confusing, at worst, misleading. (Read: "2011 Chevrolet Volt highlights from Consumer Reports track")

The basic problem, of course, is that electricity doesn't come in gallons, which makes "mpg" a meaningless measurement for cars that run on electricity.

In addition to the EPA's new measurement, other ways have been proposed to measure the overall energy consumption or environmental impact of electric cars. Perhaps the most straightforward was the one used by the Automotive X Prize, a $10 million competition for cars that get 100 miles per gallon equivalent. (See our complete Auto X Prize coverage and related blogs.) X Prize judges simply measure the total energy each car consumes in any fuel and converts it to btus, apparently reasoning that there's no reason a standard unit of energy from one energy source should cost any more than another. Then it converts the total number of btus back to an equivalent number of gallons of gas. While simple and familiar, this method can also be confusing, especially for pure electric cars.

We think all of these approaches have validity so long as consumers can understand what they can expect to pay in driving costs.

With electricity, however, even that can be uncertain. Using the national average home price of electricity of 11 cents per kilowatt hour, we expect electric cars to cost about 4 cents per mile in energy costs to drive. Depending on when you recharge, it could cost less as some utilities are promising lower rates for charging at night.

However, the Car Charging Group, the first company to install public charging stations in New York City, says they expect to charge 50 cents per kwh, more than twice as much as the highest home electric rates in the continental U.S. That would make electric cars more expensive to run than most gas cars and defeat the purpose of lowering energy costs. For example, if you had a Chevy Volt and the batteries had run flat in New York, it would be cheaper to drive home on gasoline than to recharge at one of these public charging stations. Ultimately, where you charge may be as important as what type of energy you use.

—Eric Evarts

The poll is not scientific. It reflects the opinions of only those Web users who have chosen to participate. The results cannot be assumed to represent the opinions of Web users in general, nor the public as a whole. Consumers Union is not responsible for content, functionality or the opinions expressed therein.

See our guide to fuel economy for advice on saving gasoline. Learn about future technologies in our guide to alternative fuels.