  We discuss the evolution of purity in mixed quantum/classical approaches to
electronic nonadiabatic dynamics in the context of the Ehrenfest model. As it
is impossible to exactly determine initial conditions for a realistic system,
we choose to work in the statistical Ehrenfest formalism that we introduced in
Ref. 1. From it, we develop a new framework to determine exactly the change in
the purity of the quantum subsystem along the evolution of a statistical
Ehrenfest system. In a simple case, we verify how and to which extent Ehrenfest
statistical dynamics makes a system with more than one classical trajectory and
an initial quantum pure state become a quantum mixed one. We prove this
numerically showing how the evolution of purity depends on time, on the
dimension of the quantum state space $D$, and on the number of classical
trajectories $N$ of the initial distribution. The results in this work open new
perspectives for studying decoherence with Ehrenfest dynamics.
