EV vs ICE Efficiency

If you burn gasoline in an ICE car only about 30% of the energy of that gasoline ends up actually going to propelling your vehicle. The rest is mostly lost as waste heat.Burn it in a combined cycle power plant to convert it to electricity and there are still substantial loses to waste heat but much less than when burning it an ICE car. There will be some smaller losses in the power grid and charging infrastructure to get that electricity into your battery, and some small losses in your EV

Not quite true - gasoline engine efficiency is roughly 25% while a power plant could go to 50-sh. The efficiency of transporting the power back to the electric car wheels is probably in the high 80-s low/90s. So you are ahead. Just not by that much.

They are. Remember that you also have to factor in the whole chain of crude oil underground -> wheel rotation if you want a proper comparison. Transporting and refining gasoline isn't free either.Car engines have pretty bad efficiency. You're looking at something like 25-30% typically, and that's peak efficiency. Car engines usually run well off peak efficiency because they're not at optimal RPM or power output, and then you lose even more when braking. Add on another s

Gasoline engines in road-legal cars have about 20-35% thermal efficiency. Just making the engine bigger and not caring about engine weight (like in ships or power plants) allows you to bring efficiency up to about 55%. Electric motors (as used in electric cars) are about 90% efficient.Of course you lose some charging and discharging the battery, in the charger itself and in transmission losses. But just eyeballing it it seems like the power plant should come out ahead as long as it isn't

30% is the efficiency of the energy in fuel being turned into work.You need to consider the efficiency of the power generation, power lines, battery and then the electric motor. Any other comparison is misleading.

EVs are not less efficient. When you burn gasoline you're only capturing 15-30% of it's stored chemical energy. An EV will convent 90% or more of it's energy into motion.

Untrue. Power plants can be 50-60% efficient (and up to 90% if the waste heat is used for district heating). Meanwhile car ICEs are at best 25-30% efficient (slightly more for diesels). Even with transmission losses of 4-6% and electric car charging/discharging losses of 10-20% the EV comes out ahead even when fired with fossil fuels and saddled with 500 pounds of extra weight.

Gasoline internal combustion engines run at about 30% efficiency. Diesel does somewhat better at about 40% for car size engines, and about 50% for the really big ones. Electric motors easily exceed 90% efficiency. The EV wins even without regenerative breaking, even accounting for the losses in the batteries.

The energy density of the fuel isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. The chemical energy stored in gas is much harder to use. ICE cars typically get around 20-40% efficiency. Electric motors typically get 80-90%.In some sense, they do that by moving the losses to before the battery/tank; so this isn't as big of a gain in terms of total energy usage. However, in terms of the effective capacity of the energy storage device, we don't really care about losses in refilling it.

ICE engines only manage to turn ~15% of the stored energy in gasoline into actual work. A bit of googling suggests that jet engines are about 35% efficient. Stored electricity is much more efficiently turned into mechanical work... Electric engines have 75-90% efficiency. So, you get a lot more work or unit of stored energy.