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 burning 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.
If I was going by oil company propaganda, I’d say EV tech wouldn’t get there for a generation, but I’d say it could take only a few years (assuming reasonable levels of funding).
And, as an engineer, I say “significant” as in the literal meaning of the word not as an emphasizing word sometimes used to mean “a lot”. I mean an amount that is enough to be mathematically worth including in a calculation.
As for the alternator comment, I said probably because I dont have data to say 100% for sure, but logically based on the tech it makes sense. Probably means likely.
I think you’re looking at an edge case, which is generally the current market of the majority of EVs, and then comparing it to real averages of efficiency across all types of another technology’s use cases. That’s not fair. So it may be more efficient for some and in specific cases, but what does that matter in the long run except that it’s exactly why the market stopped growing when it sold to the majority of people in those situations. Obviously, that was not the vast majority.
As I mentioned you need to consider the average driver and what they use cars for.
If you have a high efficiency slow charger and don’t travel and have below average commutes, then yeah, you (as a market) may have mitigated some of the efficiency issues with fast chargers, recharging cycles, etc.
And if you live in a mild climate and only experience extreme cold periodically and/or always charge in a relatively warm garage, that might be somewhat mitigated for you. The heaters for the batteries and drive trains drain quite a bit of energy while in use and charging a cold battery in a parking lot is less efficient. It takes more energy to charge them to the same level and the battery will hold less energy. But as I mentioned the energy inefficiencies of things like air conditioners might swing the balance if you live in primarily hot conditions.
And if your batteries are relatively new, the inefficiencies there might be mitigated for some time. Used EVs tend to have significantly diminished efficiency, capacity, and lose energy while idle at a faster and literally significant rate. Combustion cars constantly sitting in the hot sun in extreme climates similarly will lose more fuel to evaporation (otherwise the tank would be over-pressurized and be unsafe). In those cases, an EV may have a leg up.
But I’m talking average car usage and vehicle condition excluding poorly maintained vehicles as those outliers would skew things too much. The efficiency numbers that are generally used for combustion engines cover all of this as well as things like use of the alternator to power a fuel pump and other parts that are essential to operation, but not things like air conditioning use, so that’s why I made that distinction previously.
Of course I’ve only analyzed data from the US, and I’m using averages. So in a country where average commutes allow for going both directions on a single charge and thus using more efficient home chargers only may shift the balance as an example.
Fast chargers of any kind of rechargeable battery both waste more energy (which is why the EV chargers need the huge heat syncs in parking lots but not at home) and with repeated use reduce the life and thus the efficiency of the battery much more quickly. Same happens with cell phone batteries which is why modern phones trickle-charge at night when it’s likely you don’t need a full charge right away and only fast charge when needed. Many of the commercial chargers don’t even have this basic technology to allow the user to slow charge if they want (again one more reason just a few years could easily sway the balance with existing tech implemented for cars).
I could continue, but if you are not willing to consider the average use case of a vehicle and not the average use case of the EVs currently in use, it’s not really going to matter except to disappoint people who use their vehicle in an average way (average for the US anyway).
This is using energy already in a brand new battery under ideal conditions, and no inefficiencies of commercial fast chargers if you commute as much as the average in the US, and no average over the life of the battery, no average of climate effects on efficiency, or any of the other real world implications of EVs fully replacing combustion engines.
Plus it’s comparing the energy used to produce and transport the oil to gas process to the energy used to make an ideal EV car move. What about comparing the energy used to produce, transmit, and store the energy for the car. And it’s not taking into account degradation of efficiency over the life of the vehicle which, if both are well maintained, reduces much less in a combustion engine vs a battery. Plus many small cars can go more than 25 miles on a gallon of gas if that’s what we’re comparing. I know mine can.
I believe with some relatively small investments in implementing various current technology into EVs and the battery and charging infrastructure (like tech used for preserving the life of cell phone batteries for example), we could get to the point where the average could get to the point where EVs could replace nearly every type of vehicle under nearly every condition combustion engines are used in and be more efficient. That’s not at all what this article is even close to talking about, but it isn’t out of reach, just too many power struggles right now.
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.
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 burning 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.
If I was going by oil company propaganda, I’d say EV tech wouldn’t get there for a generation, but I’d say it could take only a few years (assuming reasonable levels of funding).
And, as an engineer, I say “significant” as in the literal meaning of the word not as an emphasizing word sometimes used to mean “a lot”. I mean an amount that is enough to be mathematically worth including in a calculation.
As for the alternator comment, I said probably because I dont have data to say 100% for sure, but logically based on the tech it makes sense. Probably means likely.
I think you’re looking at an edge case, which is generally the current market of the majority of EVs, and then comparing it to real averages of efficiency across all types of another technology’s use cases. That’s not fair. So it may be more efficient for some and in specific cases, but what does that matter in the long run except that it’s exactly why the market stopped growing when it sold to the majority of people in those situations. Obviously, that was not the vast majority.
As I mentioned you need to consider the average driver and what they use cars for. If you have a high efficiency slow charger and don’t travel and have below average commutes, then yeah, you (as a market) may have mitigated some of the efficiency issues with fast chargers, recharging cycles, etc.
And if you live in a mild climate and only experience extreme cold periodically and/or always charge in a relatively warm garage, that might be somewhat mitigated for you. The heaters for the batteries and drive trains drain quite a bit of energy while in use and charging a cold battery in a parking lot is less efficient. It takes more energy to charge them to the same level and the battery will hold less energy. But as I mentioned the energy inefficiencies of things like air conditioners might swing the balance if you live in primarily hot conditions.
And if your batteries are relatively new, the inefficiencies there might be mitigated for some time. Used EVs tend to have significantly diminished efficiency, capacity, and lose energy while idle at a faster and literally significant rate. Combustion cars constantly sitting in the hot sun in extreme climates similarly will lose more fuel to evaporation (otherwise the tank would be over-pressurized and be unsafe). In those cases, an EV may have a leg up.
But I’m talking average car usage and vehicle condition excluding poorly maintained vehicles as those outliers would skew things too much. The efficiency numbers that are generally used for combustion engines cover all of this as well as things like use of the alternator to power a fuel pump and other parts that are essential to operation, but not things like air conditioning use, so that’s why I made that distinction previously.
Of course I’ve only analyzed data from the US, and I’m using averages. So in a country where average commutes allow for going both directions on a single charge and thus using more efficient home chargers only may shift the balance as an example.
Fast chargers of any kind of rechargeable battery both waste more energy (which is why the EV chargers need the huge heat syncs in parking lots but not at home) and with repeated use reduce the life and thus the efficiency of the battery much more quickly. Same happens with cell phone batteries which is why modern phones trickle-charge at night when it’s likely you don’t need a full charge right away and only fast charge when needed. Many of the commercial chargers don’t even have this basic technology to allow the user to slow charge if they want (again one more reason just a few years could easily sway the balance with existing tech implemented for cars).
I could continue, but if you are not willing to consider the average use case of a vehicle and not the average use case of the EVs currently in use, it’s not really going to matter except to disappoint people who use their vehicle in an average way (average for the US anyway).
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 using energy already in a brand new battery under ideal conditions, and no inefficiencies of commercial fast chargers if you commute as much as the average in the US, and no average over the life of the battery, no average of climate effects on efficiency, or any of the other real world implications of EVs fully replacing combustion engines.
Plus it’s comparing the energy used to produce and transport the oil to gas process to the energy used to make an ideal EV car move. What about comparing the energy used to produce, transmit, and store the energy for the car. And it’s not taking into account degradation of efficiency over the life of the vehicle which, if both are well maintained, reduces much less in a combustion engine vs a battery. Plus many small cars can go more than 25 miles on a gallon of gas if that’s what we’re comparing. I know mine can.
I believe with some relatively small investments in implementing various current technology into EVs and the battery and charging infrastructure (like tech used for preserving the life of cell phone batteries for example), we could get to the point where the average could get to the point where EVs could replace nearly every type of vehicle under nearly every condition combustion engines are used in and be more efficient. That’s not at all what this article is even close to talking about, but it isn’t out of reach, just too many power struggles right now.
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.