Not quite, but it definitely could if the technology could get some funding to advance it. The batteries, chargers, and electric motors still waste a ton of energy that needs to be considered for overall efficiency. But it usually gets overlooked because it’s harder to quantify without access to a lot of proprietary data.

If we’re talking only moving the car and in optimal weather (EVs have a significant disadvantage in the cold), the combustion engine is still significantly more efficient at creating the kinetic energy from raw oil than an EV from any type of power plant’s fuel. You have to consider all the stuff that happens before the gasoline or electricity gets to the car as well as idle waste. Gasoline in a proper tank evaporates much more slowly than idle batteries lose energy.

If we’re looking at air conditioning and other electrical stuff, the engine and alternator system is probably not quite as efficient at charging the battery as the power grid and EV chargers are. It’s at least closer.

But more efficient batteries and chargers (especially the fast chargers) would probably close the gap. But not likely to happen until the oil industry collapses so the tech gets some real funding. One day it will get there. Combustion tech has no real way to improve efficiency without significantly sacrificing safety. But EVs have lots of room to improve.

I have 3 counter-arguments for this “dirty coal” nonsense:

1. Plugging into a 100% coal-powered connection still produces far fewer greenhouse gases per mile than ICE (and especially diesel).
2. The emissions are created at the power plant, and not pumped into the air directly outside your home where your children might be playing.
3. Electricity can come from pretty much infinite sources from coal to gas, solar, wind, nuclear, etc. etc. but oil only ever comes from 1 place.

While that is true in general, combined coal power plants also only sit at about 50% on average, 65% with the most modern ones.

So burning stuff in a power plant, then adding some more loss in transfer, is not actually much better.

Which of course is not an argument against EVs but against coal and gas power plants. In the end they are still just glorified rather primitive steam machines.

It’s the renewables on the grid that have to make a difference. If you’re powering an electric car purely out of electricity generated with fossil fuels you’re effectively building a series hybrid with extra steps, with the combustion engine being outside of the vehicle. Or I guess you could also compare it to a diesel-electric locomotive with the generator outside the vehicle, which he also explained in the video would not be good for efficiency. And yes at the scale of power plants you can do some things more efficient, but it’s not actually that much as the efficiency is mostly limited by similar thermodynamic processes than that happen inside an engine. A typical coal power plant also has an efficiency of 30-40% (so effectively a mediocre coal plant is similar in efficiency to a very efficient engine, and yes, some new ones can reach higher efficiencies, but the vast majority still use an old design, at least around here). But when you get the energy from a power plant you still have distribution losses on the grid, conversion losses when charging the battery and again when discharging the battery, and the efficiency losses in the electric motor, while you do not have grid losses and charging/discharging losses and losses in an electric motor with a combination engine is directly driving the wheels.

That’s why it’s important to keep investing in renewables. You indeed don’t need a whole lot of renewables to offset the efficiency losses of the battery and distribution, but you do need at least some of it. And you also should not just look at the grid as a whole, but at how the additional load of charging the vehicle gets handled. If all renewables on the grid are operating at maximum capacity all the time, and there is a coal plant that is used to burn extra coal when extra capacity is needed, then any additional load can be considered to be running on pure coal power even if the grid contains many renewable sources. But if you live in a neighbourhood where there is a constant overproduction of solar power while the grid and can charge your car at times of overproduction, then you effectively charge your car with fully green energy even if the grid contains a lot of fossil fuel plants.

You can consider electric cars to be the infrastructure that enables the transport sector to become more green, but we do also need to actively increase energy generations via green sources to actually make use of that “infrastructure”. Though I guess there is also some good news: Powering an electric car from exclusively fossil fuel energy sources puts the efficiency of the full chain somewhere between regular cars and hybrids. So it should at least never be worse than driving a regular car. Worst case it’s just equivalent. But it does need investments in green energy sources as the demand on electricity increases to become significantly better.

Fortunately that is becoming less common. If you don’t know about it (or your friends don’t), check out https://www.plugshare.com/

You can filter by charger type and see if a station is operational. Super helpful tool

my friends have told me horror stories of getting to to charging stations and finding them broken, getting stranded.

Its an unfortunate reality. My first BEV was a Chevy Bolt. The unreliability of charging infrastructure caused me a lot of pain when traveling. Got a Tesla in 2021 and that pain evaporated. Charging stations are abundant and work perfectly 99% of the time. The other 1% you just move to a different stall.

Fortunately they are slowly opening this charging network to other OEMs and I think the reliability in general has improved considerably. But it does still require some research when traveling.

If you have a multi-vehicle family it makes a lot of sense to have 1 BEV and 1 PHEV.