Damn, the average efficiency of an internal combustion engine is <30%, with the best hovering around 40%. That’s an insane waste energy, and does explain why they get so hot.
This is why the anti-EV propaganda is so bunk. Even if you plug an EV into a grid that is 100% dirty coal powered, you’re still more efficient than hauling around a gas engine that has such a low efficiency. Turns out, power plants don’t like wasting that much energy and do everything they can to squeeze as much power as they can out of it.
Then you add on that even the worst power districts in the US sit around 40% renewables and… yeah.
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.
Its like reading straight from the fossil fuel propaganda.
Absolutely untrue. All of it. It might have been true 15 years ago but not anymore.
My EV loses about 20% in the cold at its worse. We charge every four days instead of every five. Hardly “significant”.
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
bruh the entire video you’re commenting on here is a 40 minute in depth explanation on how inefficient gasoline engines are at kinetic energy and why hybrids are literally filling that gap
as well as idle waste
This is such an edge case. “Hey if you let your vehicle sit for months on end that energy may go unused”. Not only have I not experienced this, and I’m highly skeptical of this claim, it is overwhelmingly outweighed by how you haven’t literally been but ing gasoline the entire life of the vehicle.
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.
Probably? Tell me how the alternator which is a mini generator is “not quite” s efficient as the industrial generators whose job it is to literally do it 24/7.
Dude we’re already there. We already did close the gap. Literally everything you said was provably false and straight from what big oil wants you to think.
I own an EV personally. I have personally debunked absolutely everything you have said and everything else that has been hurled at me for why they are so horrible. It is by far the easiest vehicle I’ve ever owned, the most reliable, and I will never go back to an ice vehicle. My entire “fill up” equivalent price is $6 of electricity. Total. The total amount of driving to offset the mining/initial construction offsets was about 12k miles, which we are well past. The battery keeps a charge now just as well as the day it rolled off the lot.
So please, feel free to keep throwing more basic “they just won’t work” excuses because I’m literally driving proof every day that they’re wrong.
The idle waste is so stupid I really can’t… Normal gasoline has a shelf life of about 3-6 months depending on climate. After that you should pump it out of the tank. Even diesel should not be stored longer than a year.
This is probably over simplified, a refinery produces anything from plastic to jet fuel and lubricants from the same crude oil batch so while the number might be correct for gasolines part in the mix, removing it from the process would likely cause some efficiency loss in the processes, and those 6kwh would not be reclaimed in full.
With that said, we need to lower dependency on all oil products.
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.
Oh no doubt they’re horrible. Just that when looking through the lens of propaganda where a huge argument t against EVs is that it’s still hooked up to a per plant, that the pollution is not 1:1, that even the worst case power plant beats out an ICE vehicle.
But that requires critical thinking and nuance and Facebook commenters got no time for that.
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.
Damn, the average efficiency of an internal combustion engine is <30%, with the best hovering around 40%. That’s an insane waste energy, and does explain why they get so hot.
This is why the anti-EV propaganda is so bunk. Even if you plug an EV into a grid that is 100% dirty coal powered, you’re still more efficient than hauling around a gas engine that has such a low efficiency. Turns out, power plants don’t like wasting that much energy and do everything they can to squeeze as much power as they can out of it.
Then you add on that even the worst power districts in the US sit around 40% renewables and… yeah.
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.
Its like reading straight from the fossil fuel propaganda.
Absolutely untrue. All of it. It might have been true 15 years ago but not anymore.
My EV loses about 20% in the cold at its worse. We charge every four days instead of every five. Hardly “significant”.
bruh the entire video you’re commenting on here is a 40 minute in depth explanation on how inefficient gasoline engines are at kinetic energy and why hybrids are literally filling that gap
This is such an edge case. “Hey if you let your vehicle sit for months on end that energy may go unused”. Not only have I not experienced this, and I’m highly skeptical of this claim, it is overwhelmingly outweighed by how you haven’t literally been but ing gasoline the entire life of the vehicle.
Probably? Tell me how the alternator which is a mini generator is “not quite” s efficient as the industrial generators whose job it is to literally do it 24/7.
Dude we’re already there. We already did close the gap. Literally everything you said was provably false and straight from what big oil wants you to think.
I own an EV personally. I have personally debunked absolutely everything you have said and everything else that has been hurled at me for why they are so horrible. It is by far the easiest vehicle I’ve ever owned, the most reliable, and I will never go back to an ice vehicle. My entire “fill up” equivalent price is $6 of electricity. Total. The total amount of driving to offset the mining/initial construction offsets was about 12k miles, which we are well past. The battery keeps a charge now just as well as the day it rolled off the lot.
So please, feel free to keep throwing more basic “they just won’t work” excuses because I’m literally driving proof every day that they’re wrong.
The idle waste is so stupid I really can’t… Normal gasoline has a shelf life of about 3-6 months depending on climate. After that you should pump it out of the tank. Even diesel should not be stored longer than a year.
Your estimations are very incorrect. Just refining a gallon of gas uses 5kwh of electricity, an electric car will go 25km with that…
https://www.theinvadingsea.com/2025/05/07/gasoline-production-energy-fossil-fuels-refineries-internal-combustion-engine-electric-vehicles/
This is probably over simplified, a refinery produces anything from plastic to jet fuel and lubricants from the same crude oil batch so while the number might be correct for gasolines part in the mix, removing it from the process would likely cause some efficiency loss in the processes, and those 6kwh would not be reclaimed in full.
With that said, we need to lower dependency on all oil products.
I have 3 counter-arguments for this “dirty coal” nonsense:
I think I found a misunderstanding.
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.
Oh no doubt they’re horrible. Just that when looking through the lens of propaganda where a huge argument t against EVs is that it’s still hooked up to a per plant, that the pollution is not 1:1, that even the worst case power plant beats out an ICE vehicle.
But that requires critical thinking and nuance and Facebook commenters got no time for that.
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.