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Adam Harms
Adam Harms @AdamHarms

You Don’t Realize How Inefficient Combustion Engines are.

Forbes Article James Morris Contributor One of the most frequent focuses of discussion between electric vehicle adopters and their critics is range. The usual argument is that fossil fuel vehicles can do 700 miles between refuels and take five minutes to do so. But the range focus hides a very important feature of battery-electric cars – they are much more efficient than internal combustion. Read More: forbes.com/...
You Probably Don’t Realize How Inefficient Internal Combustion Engines Are
Compared to battery-electric vehicles, internal combustion wastes most of its energy, but you probably don't know just how much.
www.forbes.com
Jonathan Fisk@JonathanF
Jonathan Fisk
This is a highly inaccurate comparison. Batteries just store energy that was generated somewhere else, IC engines convert the potential energy in petrol or diesel by burning it. If you want to compare efficiency, you have to take the conversion efficiency of generating the electricity and transmitting it to the charger into account as well. This can vary tremendously depending on how the electricity is generated; solar, nuclear and coal have very different efficiencies and emissions. I'm sure the EV is still more efficient, but the difference won't be as dramatic.