The Efficiency and Emissions of Electric Cars Compared to Gasoline Vehicles

We are currently at a stage where we can compare the efficiency and emissions of electric cars with those of gasoline vehicles. To do this, let's start by looking at the best Hybrid getting 52 miles per gallon, the best gasoline vehicle getting 35 miles per gallon, and the average gasoline vehicle getting just 23 miles per gallon.

Assuming that conversion of hydrogen into electricity, we can get 47 miles for an electric car. This is a significant advantage over the hybrid and gasoline vehicles. The Model 3, which is an electric car, gets about 60 miles from one gallon of energy, which is triple the distance of the average gasoline vehicle.

As we compare these distances, it becomes clear that electric cars are significantly more efficient than gasoline vehicles. However, it's essential to consider other factors such as performance and weight. The Model S, which is a high-performance electric car, weighs 2,000 pounds more than the Model 3. This difference in weight can affect the overall efficiency of each vehicle.

To make a more accurate comparison, let's look at the gasoline equivalent of these vehicles. If we assume that the Hyundai Ioniq, an electric car with similar characteristics to the Model 3, is driving on gasoline, it will actually be more efficient as an electric car. This means that the electric car will get better fuel economy than the gasoline vehicle.

When looking at emissions, we need to consider the source fuel used by each vehicle. We are using natural gas for the electric cars and hydrogen crude oil for the gasoline vehicles. Natural gas has a lower carbon content than petroleum, which is why it produces fewer emissions per mile.

Let's do some math to determine the emissions per mile of each vehicle. Starting with our Model 3, we get 107 grams of CO2 per mile. The Model S gets 128 grams of CO2 per mile, while the hydrogen gets 137 grams of CO2 per mile. The hybrid gets 170 grams of CO2 per mile, and the best gasoline vehicle gets 394 grams of CO2 per mile.

These numbers are close to what the EPA says is the average emissions of a vehicle in the US, which is around 404 grams of CO2 per mile. However, even with these assumptions, electric cars come out on top when it comes to emissions.

Another interesting comparison is between the worst electric car on the market and the best gasoline vehicle. The worst electric car has an emissions rate of 192 grams of CO2 per mile, which is half that of the average gasoline vehicle.

The production emissions of an electric car are not as high as those of a gasoline car. However, as time goes on, the grid will improve, making electric cars even cleaner. This means that distances such as those mentioned earlier will decrease, but emissions will dramatically decrease.

To further understand this concept, it's recommended to check out my video on electric car production and batteries and their impacts on the environment. In this video, we'll explore how an electric car can offset its production emissions in as little as two years compared to a gasoline vehicle.

A special thank you to amaze for sponsoring the video. If you're interested in winning a one-of-a-kind 1965 convertible VW Bug powered with Tesla batteries, head over to my calm channel to learn more about how to donate and potentially win this unique prize. Every donation helps support the Planetary Society, which works towards making humanity a multi-planetary species.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be discussing whether Tesla cars are actually better for the environment versus internal combustion alternatives this video is brought to you by omae's and you might be wondering what in the world does a 1965 Volkswagen Beetle have to do with Tesla and the environment well this is no ordinary Beetle it's powered with Tesla batteries it's fully electric and omae's is giving it away all you have to do is go to omae's calm /ee and enter for your chance to win and every donation helps support the Planetary Society to advance space science and exploration now the goal of this video is to determine if Tesla's are better for the environment than other options and we're going to focus on two aspects primarily efficiency and the secondary focus will be emissions if you're curious about emissions associated with producing an electric car or the consequences of electric car battery production I already have two videos covering this in detail which I'd recommend you check out so starting off with efficiency I found a paper written by Martin Eberhard and Mark carpeting if you're unfamiliar with their names there are the original founders of Tesla in this paper the two engineers were attempting to determine which energy sources for transportation would result in the absolute minimum amount of energy required starting from the well and ending at the wheel the document is well referenced so feel free to examine the sources for the purposes of this video I'll be using more conservative numbers to make the case for Tesla a bit more challenging alright so we're trying to figure out what's the most efficient method of transportation so of course a part of that equation is going to be the fuel efficiency of the method of transportation which we are choosing now there's many different energy sources which we can use to have some form of transportation and those different forms of transportation will have a different fuel economy so we're really going to focus on just four different methods there's all kinds of different energy sources you could choose from biodiesel hybrids hydrogen that kind of thing so we're just going to look at several of these examples the ones that we have available today and analyze the best examples in each category so for their energy source the purpose of this video we're discussing Tesla we're gonna look at a model 3 and a Model S which are battery electric and the model 3 standard range plus getting a mile per gallon equivalent combined rating of 133 MPG the Model S long range getting a combined rating of 111 so this is EPA combined MPG rating that we are comparing here for a diesel the most efficient diesel in the US is the Chevy Cruze which has a combined fuel economy rating of 37 mpg for gasoline the purely gasoline no hybrids here the most efficient vehicle we have for 2019 in the u.s. is the Mitsubishi Mirage which is 39 mpg and so you might be this might be throwing a red flag at you saying wait a minute the most efficient diesel gets worse fuel economy than the gasoline and you know the real world there may be a diesel example that's going to beat the combined rating of the best gasoline example because diesel engines are more efficient that said hybrids are still going to win so we have the best hybrid here the hyundai ioniq which is getting 58 mpg so for the purposes of this video we're just going to treat diesel and gasoline as the same because the numbers are pretty close so we're just going to use gasoline with 39 mpg as our equivalent if a diesel is capable of being better then you can think of it getting closer to this hybrid region right here with the hyundai ioniq we're also going to be looking at hydrogen fuel cells so this is a more efficient way of hydrogen transportation versus hydrogen combustion and our most efficient example we have in the US market is the Honda clarity hydrogen which will get a MPG equivalent of 68 so if you look at these numbers here one more that we're going to include for the USA the average fuel economy for vehicles is about 25 mpg so you know we're going to be comparing against best-case scenario where the average is significantly lower for the US now looking at all of these numbers we think immediately okay well obviously the Tesla wins here because it has the highest MPG rating but that is not taken to consideration whatsoever we that energy comes from so if all the energy came from renewable sources great we don't have to worry about emissions at all so we don't really have to do this exercise as we all know that's not realistic so we have to take a look at where does that energy actually come from to power each of these transportation methods okay so the question we're now trying to answer is from the initial amount of energy we started with how much of that energy actually makes it to the vehicle that can be used to scoot that vehicle along to wherever it's going so we're gonna look at the four different scenarios here gasoline you can think of this as diesel also hybrid electric and hydrogen so starting with gasoline we have extraction we have refinement we have transportation has to get to those fuel stations and then pumped into your car there's an efficiency of this process of each of these processes and according to a study by multiple of the major oil companies they say that this process is about eighty 1.7 percent efficient now we're gonna give gasoline the benefit out here to make it a little bit more tricky for electric to actually win just to make this comparison a bit harder for electric cars and say that this process is 90% efficient so what does that mean well if we started with a hundred gallons of gasoline worth of energy sitting down there in the ground then we have 90 gallons actually that we can use for our vehicle to move moving along to hybrids those are of course using gasoline so that efficiency number is exactly the same 90% moving on to electric cars we are going to assume 100 percent of the electricity used to power an electric car comes from fossil fuels in the form of natural gas now that's not actually true in the United States natural gas makes up about 36% of our energy production coal 28% nuclear 19% and renewables 17% so there are definitely regions in the US which this math isn't necessarily going to be accurate for because the energy production is far cleaner using nuclear renewable that said we're kind of going worst case once again we're we're using natural gas purely entirely 100 percent in order to power our electric car so purely on fossil fuels so for natural gas looking at the efficiency of the process recovering that natural gas is about ninety seven point five percent efficient processing that natural yes 97.5% efficient then generating electricity using that natural gas using a combined cycle turbine generator that's going to be about 60 percent efficient sending that electricity through the grid so there's going to be efficiency losses from sending that power over the grid that's going to be about 92% efficient and then finally we have to charge the car so the energy has to come from the outlet and go into the battery of the car and so that process Tesla says there you get about 86% efficiency so if we multiply all of these efficiencies out 97.5 times this times this times this times this we get about 45% efficient about half that of gasoline so if we started with a hundred gallons of gasoline that we can now use to power our gasoline vehicle we have 90 remaining in order if we start with a hundred gallons for our electric vehicle we only have 45 remaining so a significant difference in efficiency as far as where that energy is coming from then moving along to hydrogen the majority of hydrogen is created by reforming a natural gas so working through this once again the entire process of recovering the natural gas generating hydrogen transporting and compressing that hydrogen and then dumping it into the vehicle itself best case we're getting about 60% efficiency there now we're not done yet because we can't actually just use the hydrogen that's sitting on the vehicle it has to be converted into electricity so that's what the fuel cell is doing and the best fuel cells are gonna operate at about 60% efficiency so once we've converted that into energy that we can actually use we are sitting at just 36 percent efficiency so we started with a hundred gallons we're now down to just 36 gallons that we can use to move this hydrogen vehicle worth of energy now before we reach the final results I know many will be wondering doesn't the size of the battery pack matter and yes it absolutely does the smaller battery pack in the Tesla powered beetle for example which is good for about a hundred miles again you can check this out at omae's comm /e e requires less material and thus less emissions to produce versus a larger battery pack capable of 300 miles of range if you're curious about how the math work sell-on vehicle production electric versus combustion I have a separate video deep diving into this so now we have all of the information to reach our conclusion so we know what the production efficiency is for each of the different transportation methods and we know what the fuel economy is for each of these different methods so now we are going to multiply those together and that will give us a distance so what does this distance represent well it tells us how far we can physically move the vehicle from one spot to another spot using just one gallons worth of gasoline energy equivalency so whether that's one gallon of gasoline or thirty three point seven kilowatt hours which is the gasoline equivalent of one gallon that's how far we can travel with that one gallon from the very beginning stages where we're digging it up from the ground and then driving it that vehicle how far does it actually get so multiplying that for the Model 3 we get sixty miles on that one gallon with the Model S we get 50 now for hydrogen you'll notice this is a different number than what we started with in the beginning that's because this is about the energy efficiency of a good electric car once we've already done the conversion onboard of that hydrogen to electricity it's essentially just an electric car so it gets better fuel economy assuming that we've already taken to account that conversion of hydrogen into electricity multiplying that across we get 47 miles the best Hybrid getting 52 miles the best gasoline getting 35 miles and the average gasoline getting just 23 miles so this is where it becomes pretty clear just how efficient electric cars are you can see that the distance of Model 3 is going to travel on that one gallons worth of energy is 60 miles about triple that of the average gasoline vehicle of 23 miles and you may look at this best hybrid and say well this is 52 it's getting better than that Model S but keep in mind these are in completely different performance categories here also this Model S weighs 2,000 pounds more also we're assuming it's getting its energy from neck natural gas and also we're assuming a good efficiency for that crude oil conversion into gasoline so there's a lot of assumptions there which are giving this hybrid the benefit of the doubt and just barely squeaks by if you were to look at the gasoline equivalent of this exact car the hyundai ioniq it's actually going to be much more efficient as an electric car so the apples to apples comparison the electric car would still be winning there and then looking at now emissions and so what we do here is we look at the source fuel in this case we're using natural gas for the electrics and hydrogen crude oil for the gasoline and this source fuel has a certain amount of carbon in it from the beginning and so we're assuming that we're going to convert that carbon into co2 through this process here and so by doing some math you can determine how many grams of co2 you create per mile for each of these different options source you'll hear being natural gas source fuel here at being crude oil of course if this was not natural gas that was something like hydropower or you know if it was let's say solar power then of course these emissions are going to go down to basically zero on a per mile basis driven so going down the line here starting with our model three we're at 107 grams per mile the Model S 128 the hydrogen 137 the hybrid 170 then our best gasoline to 52 and then our average gasoline 394 and remember why are these a little bit different well burning natural gas is going to be a little bit less co2 than burning petroleum so that's why you'll see even the hydrogen wins out there even though it had a lower distance and then also you know as kind of a sanity check I wanted to look at what's the average emissions of a vehicle in the US based on the EPA so this is what I'm saying this math checks out to 394 the EPA says the average vehicle in the US emits 404 grams per mile of co2 so the math actually does work out pretty accurate to get close to what the EPA says average actual average is and something that's interesting to look at here is if we look at the worst evie on the market the worst 20:19 Evi which is a 6,000 pound electric SUV its emissions per mile or 192 assuming all of its energy comes from natural gas so even the worst electric car on the market has half the emissions of the average gasoline vehicle and we're not even considering that gasoline vehicles are also going to have sulfur emissions carbon monoxide emissions nitrogen dioxide emissions particulate matter hydrocarbons so once you start doing the math on these things what's cool is that it just becomes very obvious yes the electric car from an emissions standpoint is going to be far superior from an efficiency standpoint is far superior and you could also go back and say you know what production emissions of something like solar power is not as efficient as using natural gas and you'd be correct and so these distances would go down here however these emissions would dramatically go down versus these would not change so what's cool about electric cars is they will get better with time as the grid improves versus these really won't you know we're reaching very high peak efficiencies in gasoline course there's not too much more left there to be achieved and yet electric cars will get so much cleaner simply from cleaning up the grid so a neat experiment to kind of go through the math of how this all works again I'd recommend checking out my video on electric car production and batteries and their impacts on the environment if you have not already where you'll find that an electric car can actually offset its production emissions in as little as two years compared to a gasoline vehicle so a big thank you to amaze for sponsoring the video remember for your chance to win the one-of-a-kind 1965 convertible VW Bug powered with Tesla batteries head to omae's calm /ee every donation helps support the Planetary Society if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watchinghello everyone and welcome in this video we're going to be discussing whether Tesla cars are actually better for the environment versus internal combustion alternatives this video is brought to you by omae's and you might be wondering what in the world does a 1965 Volkswagen Beetle have to do with Tesla and the environment well this is no ordinary Beetle it's powered with Tesla batteries it's fully electric and omae's is giving it away all you have to do is go to omae's calm /ee and enter for your chance to win and every donation helps support the Planetary Society to advance space science and exploration now the goal of this video is to determine if Tesla's are better for the environment than other options and we're going to focus on two aspects primarily efficiency and the secondary focus will be emissions if you're curious about emissions associated with producing an electric car or the consequences of electric car battery production I already have two videos covering this in detail which I'd recommend you check out so starting off with efficiency I found a paper written by Martin Eberhard and Mark carpeting if you're unfamiliar with their names there are the original founders of Tesla in this paper the two engineers were attempting to determine which energy sources for transportation would result in the absolute minimum amount of energy required starting from the well and ending at the wheel the document is well referenced so feel free to examine the sources for the purposes of this video I'll be using more conservative numbers to make the case for Tesla a bit more challenging alright so we're trying to figure out what's the most efficient method of transportation so of course a part of that equation is going to be the fuel efficiency of the method of transportation which we are choosing now there's many different energy sources which we can use to have some form of transportation and those different forms of transportation will have a different fuel economy so we're really going to focus on just four different methods there's all kinds of different energy sources you could choose from biodiesel hybrids hydrogen that kind of thing so we're just going to look at several of these examples the ones that we have available today and analyze the best examples in each category so for their energy source the purpose of this video we're discussing Tesla we're gonna look at a model 3 and a Model S which are battery electric and the model 3 standard range plus getting a mile per gallon equivalent combined rating of 133 MPG the Model S long range getting a combined rating of 111 so this is EPA combined MPG rating that we are comparing here for a diesel the most efficient diesel in the US is the Chevy Cruze which has a combined fuel economy rating of 37 mpg for gasoline the purely gasoline no hybrids here the most efficient vehicle we have for 2019 in the u.s. is the Mitsubishi Mirage which is 39 mpg and so you might be this might be throwing a red flag at you saying wait a minute the most efficient diesel gets worse fuel economy than the gasoline and you know the real world there may be a diesel example that's going to beat the combined rating of the best gasoline example because diesel engines are more efficient that said hybrids are still going to win so we have the best hybrid here the hyundai ioniq which is getting 58 mpg so for the purposes of this video we're just going to treat diesel and gasoline as the same because the numbers are pretty close so we're just going to use gasoline with 39 mpg as our equivalent if a diesel is capable of being better then you can think of it getting closer to this hybrid region right here with the hyundai ioniq we're also going to be looking at hydrogen fuel cells so this is a more efficient way of hydrogen transportation versus hydrogen combustion and our most efficient example we have in the US market is the Honda clarity hydrogen which will get a MPG equivalent of 68 so if you look at these numbers here one more that we're going to include for the USA the average fuel economy for vehicles is about 25 mpg so you know we're going to be comparing against best-case scenario where the average is significantly lower for the US now looking at all of these numbers we think immediately okay well obviously the Tesla wins here because it has the highest MPG rating but that is not taken to consideration whatsoever we that energy comes from so if all the energy came from renewable sources great we don't have to worry about emissions at all so we don't really have to do this exercise as we all know that's not realistic so we have to take a look at where does that energy actually come from to power each of these transportation methods okay so the question we're now trying to answer is from the initial amount of energy we started with how much of that energy actually makes it to the vehicle that can be used to scoot that vehicle along to wherever it's going so we're gonna look at the four different scenarios here gasoline you can think of this as diesel also hybrid electric and hydrogen so starting with gasoline we have extraction we have refinement we have transportation has to get to those fuel stations and then pumped into your car there's an efficiency of this process of each of these processes and according to a study by multiple of the major oil companies they say that this process is about eighty 1.7 percent efficient now we're gonna give gasoline the benefit out here to make it a little bit more tricky for electric to actually win just to make this comparison a bit harder for electric cars and say that this process is 90% efficient so what does that mean well if we started with a hundred gallons of gasoline worth of energy sitting down there in the ground then we have 90 gallons actually that we can use for our vehicle to move moving along to hybrids those are of course using gasoline so that efficiency number is exactly the same 90% moving on to electric cars we are going to assume 100 percent of the electricity used to power an electric car comes from fossil fuels in the form of natural gas now that's not actually true in the United States natural gas makes up about 36% of our energy production coal 28% nuclear 19% and renewables 17% so there are definitely regions in the US which this math isn't necessarily going to be accurate for because the energy production is far cleaner using nuclear renewable that said we're kind of going worst case once again we're we're using natural gas purely entirely 100 percent in order to power our electric car so purely on fossil fuels so for natural gas looking at the efficiency of the process recovering that natural gas is about ninety seven point five percent efficient processing that natural yes 97.5% efficient then generating electricity using that natural gas using a combined cycle turbine generator that's going to be about 60 percent efficient sending that electricity through the grid so there's going to be efficiency losses from sending that power over the grid that's going to be about 92% efficient and then finally we have to charge the car so the energy has to come from the outlet and go into the battery of the car and so that process Tesla says there you get about 86% efficiency so if we multiply all of these efficiencies out 97.5 times this times this times this times this we get about 45% efficient about half that of gasoline so if we started with a hundred gallons of gasoline that we can now use to power our gasoline vehicle we have 90 remaining in order if we start with a hundred gallons for our electric vehicle we only have 45 remaining so a significant difference in efficiency as far as where that energy is coming from then moving along to hydrogen the majority of hydrogen is created by reforming a natural gas so working through this once again the entire process of recovering the natural gas generating hydrogen transporting and compressing that hydrogen and then dumping it into the vehicle itself best case we're getting about 60% efficiency there now we're not done yet because we can't actually just use the hydrogen that's sitting on the vehicle it has to be converted into electricity so that's what the fuel cell is doing and the best fuel cells are gonna operate at about 60% efficiency so once we've converted that into energy that we can actually use we are sitting at just 36 percent efficiency so we started with a hundred gallons we're now down to just 36 gallons that we can use to move this hydrogen vehicle worth of energy now before we reach the final results I know many will be wondering doesn't the size of the battery pack matter and yes it absolutely does the smaller battery pack in the Tesla powered beetle for example which is good for about a hundred miles again you can check this out at omae's comm /e e requires less material and thus less emissions to produce versus a larger battery pack capable of 300 miles of range if you're curious about how the math work sell-on vehicle production electric versus combustion I have a separate video deep diving into this so now we have all of the information to reach our conclusion so we know what the production efficiency is for each of the different transportation methods and we know what the fuel economy is for each of these different methods so now we are going to multiply those together and that will give us a distance so what does this distance represent well it tells us how far we can physically move the vehicle from one spot to another spot using just one gallons worth of gasoline energy equivalency so whether that's one gallon of gasoline or thirty three point seven kilowatt hours which is the gasoline equivalent of one gallon that's how far we can travel with that one gallon from the very beginning stages where we're digging it up from the ground and then driving it that vehicle how far does it actually get so multiplying that for the Model 3 we get sixty miles on that one gallon with the Model S we get 50 now for hydrogen you'll notice this is a different number than what we started with in the beginning that's because this is about the energy efficiency of a good electric car once we've already done the conversion onboard of that hydrogen to electricity it's essentially just an electric car so it gets better fuel economy assuming that we've already taken to account that conversion of hydrogen into electricity multiplying that across we get 47 miles the best Hybrid getting 52 miles the best gasoline getting 35 miles and the average gasoline getting just 23 miles so this is where it becomes pretty clear just how efficient electric cars are you can see that the distance of Model 3 is going to travel on that one gallons worth of energy is 60 miles about triple that of the average gasoline vehicle of 23 miles and you may look at this best hybrid and say well this is 52 it's getting better than that Model S but keep in mind these are in completely different performance categories here also this Model S weighs 2,000 pounds more also we're assuming it's getting its energy from neck natural gas and also we're assuming a good efficiency for that crude oil conversion into gasoline so there's a lot of assumptions there which are giving this hybrid the benefit of the doubt and just barely squeaks by if you were to look at the gasoline equivalent of this exact car the hyundai ioniq it's actually going to be much more efficient as an electric car so the apples to apples comparison the electric car would still be winning there and then looking at now emissions and so what we do here is we look at the source fuel in this case we're using natural gas for the electrics and hydrogen crude oil for the gasoline and this source fuel has a certain amount of carbon in it from the beginning and so we're assuming that we're going to convert that carbon into co2 through this process here and so by doing some math you can determine how many grams of co2 you create per mile for each of these different options source you'll hear being natural gas source fuel here at being crude oil of course if this was not natural gas that was something like hydropower or you know if it was let's say solar power then of course these emissions are going to go down to basically zero on a per mile basis driven so going down the line here starting with our model three we're at 107 grams per mile the Model S 128 the hydrogen 137 the hybrid 170 then our best gasoline to 52 and then our average gasoline 394 and remember why are these a little bit different well burning natural gas is going to be a little bit less co2 than burning petroleum so that's why you'll see even the hydrogen wins out there even though it had a lower distance and then also you know as kind of a sanity check I wanted to look at what's the average emissions of a vehicle in the US based on the EPA so this is what I'm saying this math checks out to 394 the EPA says the average vehicle in the US emits 404 grams per mile of co2 so the math actually does work out pretty accurate to get close to what the EPA says average actual average is and something that's interesting to look at here is if we look at the worst evie on the market the worst 20:19 Evi which is a 6,000 pound electric SUV its emissions per mile or 192 assuming all of its energy comes from natural gas so even the worst electric car on the market has half the emissions of the average gasoline vehicle and we're not even considering that gasoline vehicles are also going to have sulfur emissions carbon monoxide emissions nitrogen dioxide emissions particulate matter hydrocarbons so once you start doing the math on these things what's cool is that it just becomes very obvious yes the electric car from an emissions standpoint is going to be far superior from an efficiency standpoint is far superior and you could also go back and say you know what production emissions of something like solar power is not as efficient as using natural gas and you'd be correct and so these distances would go down here however these emissions would dramatically go down versus these would not change so what's cool about electric cars is they will get better with time as the grid improves versus these really won't you know we're reaching very high peak efficiencies in gasoline course there's not too much more left there to be achieved and yet electric cars will get so much cleaner simply from cleaning up the grid so a neat experiment to kind of go through the math of how this all works again I'd recommend checking out my video on electric car production and batteries and their impacts on the environment if you have not already where you'll find that an electric car can actually offset its production emissions in as little as two years compared to a gasoline vehicle so a big thank you to amaze for sponsoring the video remember for your chance to win the one-of-a-kind 1965 convertible VW Bug powered with Tesla batteries head to omae's calm /ee every donation helps support the Planetary Society if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watching\n"