**The Efficiency of Electric Vehicles: A Comparative Analysis**

When it comes to evaluating the efficiency of electric vehicles (EVs), there are several factors to consider, including aerodynamic drag, rolling resistance, and overall system losses. In this article, we will delve into the world of EV efficiency, exploring how different variables impact performance and discussing some interesting findings from various studies.

**Understanding Vehicle Efficiency**

To understand vehicle efficiency, it's helpful to visualize a chart that shows the total energy required to travel one mile at a certain speed, with different colors representing aerodynamic drag, rolling resistance, and overall system losses. By overlaying these energies on top of each other, we can see just how much energy is lost due to various factors. In this case, the blue line represents the overall energy required to travel one mile, while the red line shows the amount of energy needed to overcome aerodynamic drag, the yellow line indicates the rolling resistance, and the remaining blue space represents the energy required for everything else that's happening – including climate control, onboard computers, screens, cameras, and drivetrain efficiencies.

**Analyzing the Tesla Model S Long Range**

Let's take a closer look at the Tesla Model S Long Range, which was tested on a 4.7-mile oval track in Chelsea, with all-season tires and an aerodynamic advantage from the arrow cover wheels. The results showed a minimal system efficiency of 70.8% at 50 miles per hour, 70.6% at 70 miles per hour, and 80.5% at 90 miles per hour. These numbers are impressive, especially considering that the Tesla Model S Long Range has a combined 141 mile-per-gallon-equivalent rating, making it currently the most energy-efficient car for sale in the US.

**Comparing to Gasoline Vehicles**

To put these results into perspective, let's consider a gasoline vehicle with the same size and shape as the Tesla Model S Long Range. If this vehicle achieved an EPA rating of 40 miles per gallon on the highway at 70 miles per hour, its minimal system efficiency would be approximately 26.6%. This means that the electric vehicle is nearly three times more efficient than a gasoline-powered equivalent.

**The Impact of System Losses**

One important factor to consider when evaluating EV efficiency is the impact of system losses. These can include factors such as onboard computer power consumption, screen and camera usage, climate control operation, and drivetrain efficiencies. By analyzing these losses, we can gain a better understanding of just how efficient an electric vehicle truly is.

**Using LastPass for Secure Password Management**

While efficiency is important, it's equally crucial to consider the security aspect of our digital lives. This is where LastPass comes in – a password management tool that remembers all of your passwords so you don't have to. With LastPass, you can use a different, long, and complex password for every website or platform, eliminating the need to remember multiple credentials.

**Conclusion**

In conclusion, electric vehicles offer impressive efficiency gains compared to their gasoline-powered counterparts. By analyzing various studies and considering factors such as system losses and aerodynamic drag, we can gain a deeper understanding of just how efficient these vehicles truly are. As the demand for sustainable transportation continues to grow, it's essential that we invest in research and development to further improve the efficiency and range of electric vehicles.

**Additional Resources**

For more information on EV efficiency and LastPass password management, be sure to check out the links provided in the video description.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhello everyone and welcome a portion of this video is sponsored by LastPass we'll get into that at the end so let's jump right to our topic how efficient are tesla's now I'm not talking about mpg ratings here anyone can look up efficiency ratings the 2018 model 3 performance is rated at 116 mile per gallon combined equivalent but what I'm curious about is how much energy that starts in the battery actually makes it to the wheels to push the car forward so we're looking for a percentage what percentage of battery power goes towards useful work as in actually moving the car now this turned out to be quite challenging to figure out collecting the data is very difficult you have to make certain assumptions and you know the real world has a lot of variables that are pretty tough to control but that's not going to stop us so let's dive right in the first method I thought would be rather simple to implement was to just look at my energy efficiency while driving at a certain speed and then calculate my losses at that speed whatever energy is left over is the energy that's either lost as heat or to power the onboard electronics transmit data use the eight cameras and many proximity sensors and so on so I started with the data I had from my 2,000 mile road trip that I took my model 3 on last summer on that trip I traveled 1963 miles and used 560 kilowatt hours of energy to do so that's an average of about 285 watt hours per mile now most of the trip was spent on the highway with cruise control sitting at 75 miles per hour highway efficiency averaged around 290 watt hours per mile ranging from about 270 to about 310 that was in pretty ideal temperatures high 70s low 80s but almost always the AC was on and set to auto so if I know my efficiency is 291 hours per mile and I know my speed is 75 miles per hour I can calculate a few things first we're calculating how much energy we need to overcome aerodynamic drag in this case we're using 290 watt hours to travel one mile so let's see how much of that energy is needed to travel one mile for aerodynamics alone energy equals four times distance we know the equation for force we simply plug in the numbers now I'm going to use atmospheric pressure and all usual metrics I generally go with for the drag coefficient Tesla states its point two three and for the frontal area I'm using twenty five point five square feet which I found from someone who 3d modeled the vehicle more on this number later once we convert our units to watt hours we get one hundred sixty seven point eight watt hours per mile now for rolling resistance we take our weight in this case there were two people in the car plus a ton of extra stuff so we've got four thousand five hundred seventy two pounds total we multiply that by our rolling resistance coefficient this is often around 0.015 so we'll plug that in and we get one hundred thirty six point four now this number is super close to the arrow number because the car is really heavy meaning lots of rolling resistance but also super aerodynamic meaning low arrow drag usually these numbers would be further apart but you've probably already realized one hundred sixty seven point eight plus one hundred thirty-six point four is greater than two hundred ninety watt hours per mile our original efficiency to find out how efficient our vehicle needs to be we take the total energy we need for steady-state 75 mile per hour driving divided by the total energy we used and we find out the powertrain is 105 percent efficient at the very least oh boy so multiple things here are wrong the rolling resistance is probably wrong it's probably better as Tesla seeks tires that have good rolling resistance in this case bespoke Michelin Pilot Sport 4s the air density is based on standard pressures it's likely a bit off and our frontal area is from some random simulation on the internet so that's probably wrong too so let's get better data now the first thing that troubled me here is the frontal area and you might just be like Jason why don't you just measure it it's really not something that's very easy to measure I thought about taking a string and going around the widest section of the car but you still have to get the shape right or the area is wrong I asked Tesla for the figure and they were happy to chat but ultimately only provided basic dimensions like width and height but maybe that's all I really need so there was a very cool study done by car and driver and in this study there is a Tesla model as tested which they note has a frontal area of 25.2 square feet I know the width and height of the Model S I know it's frontal area and I know the width and height of a Model 3 so if conveniently the Model S and Model 3 were to have a very similar shape for frontal area which an overlay of the front profile shows quite obviously then we can simply use ratios to get a pretty good idea of what the model threes frontal area is using ratios we can guesstimate the model threes frontal area is about twenty-three point six nine feet squared nice so now that we have a better idea of frontal area my goal was to collect a bunch of efficiency data in order to do this I drove around pretty aimlessly until I had found some straight flat farmland I then used the on-board computer to measure energy efficiency over a two mile straightaway to compensate for wind and elevation changes I then did the two miles in the opposite direction and averaged with the first number I did this multiple times for multiple speeds until finally I built myself a bit of a speed versus fuel efficiency comparison now the only variable that is not stock about this vehicle is that it's currently on a set of winter wheels and tires obviously this has an effect but I don't think it's going to be that large of an effect for various reasons first Wiener tires have higher rolling resistance than summer tires but I saw a quote from Continental that winter tires can now match the rolling resistance of performance summer tires and in some cases they're even better this car comes standard with Michelin ps4s tires and based on the data I've seen rolling resistance numbers are actually pretty similar but there's also the aerodynamic drag portion of a wheel these obviously aren't going to be as aerodynamic as something with a wheel cover however this is the model 3 performance which comes with large 20-inch wheels these are 18-inch wheels and they're lighter overall it's something important to know but also something that likely won't have massive impacts on the overall efficiency numbers so at 50 miles per hour I saw 213 watt hours per mile at fifty five to thirty one at sixty to sixty one point five at sixty five to seventy six point five and at seventy miles per hour 307 watt hours per mile overall say the quality of the data I recorded looks decent it has some flaws but thankfully the trend is in the right direction and overall with an increase in speed there is an increase in energy required if we look at the total energy use side-by-side with the amount of energy required for aerodynamic drag we can see the corresponding bump and aerodynamic drag causes a similar increase in total energy consumption now there's a lot of numbers that go into these calculations so for a detailed explanation of how they're derived check out the video description I do wish the data were a little cleaner but driving out in the real world means it's very difficult to control all variables now more importantly what can we learn from this so if we look at a chart of total energy required to travel one mile at a certain speed in blue side by side with the amount of energy required to overcome aerodynamic drag in red and rolling resistance in yellow we can start to get an idea of how efficient the overall vehicle is if we overlay the aerodynamic energy required on top of the overall plus the rolling resistance on top of the overall the remaining blue space is the energy required for everything else that's happening that means climate control which in this case was off the speakers again in this case off but other things that are always running such as onboard computers the screens camera monitoring not to mention of course the drivetrain efficiencies the power comes from the battery through the inverters to the motors through a gear reduction box all the related bearings and of course this is an all-wheel drive vehicle so it's sent to all four wheels essentially what this graph is showing us is our worst case powertrain efficiency because here's how much energy we know we need at a minimum to cover one mile at seventy miles per hour and here's how much energy it actually took to do so so if we divide the needed energy by the total energy we get a percentage we can do this for each of our five tests and then take the average of those five results and we get a minimal efficiency of nearly seventy one percent seventy one percent now perhaps that number doesn't mean much to you that twenty nine percent of total energy remaining goes towards losses running on board systems all wheel drive things of that nature but let's say we had a gasoline vehicle with the same size and shape as the slit they got 40 miles per gallon on the highway at 70 miles per hour and 40 miles per gallon is pretty good for a gasoline engine well in that case the minimal system efficiency of the gasoline vehicle achieving 40 miles per gallon would be just 26.6% in this hypothetical scenario the Tesla is 266 percent more efficient if you're curious about the total efficiency from deriving the energy meaning power production all the way to the wheels I have a separate video covering this in detail linked in the video description now maybe at this point you're not happy with the data I've collected and you're thinking this is all nonsense fair so I found some Car and Driver data where they tested their long range all-wheel drive Tesla Model 3 with the arrow cover wheels at Chelsea proving grounds so all of their testing was done on a 4.7 mile oval eliminating elevation changes traffic and for the most part wind as variables affecting the results the one caveat is that their testing was done in 44 degree weather with the climate control on set to auto at 72 degrees with the arrow wheels their efficiency numbers were 250 watt hours per mile at 50 miles per hour 310 at 70 miles per hour and 405 at 90 miles per hour taking the average of their results the minimal system efficiency was 70 point 8 percent surprisingly close to my average calculated at 70 point 6 6 percent now they obviously had an aerodynamic advantage from the wheels and are using all season tires which likely have less rolling resistance but they also have climate control running while it's 44 degrees outside if you were to turn the climate control off in this scenario it's not too difficult to imagine seeing system efficiencies greater than 80 percent overall the Tesla's efficiency is quite quite impressive hence according to the EPA the Tesla Model 3 standard range plus with a combined 141 mile per gallon equivalent rating is currently the most energy efficient car for sale in the u.s. today well done now again thanks to last pass for sponsoring a portion of this video LastPass is a password management tool that remembers all of your passwords so that you don't need to this means you can use a different password for every website which is vital for security but that of course means it's difficult to remember all of them no longer a problem now I started looking into the number of accounts that I use and it turns out I'm using over 130 different username and password combinations for various websites and platforms so the whole idea of LastPass is that you have one very difficult long password to log into your account and then you don't have to remember all of the other passwords and LastPass doesn't actually have access to your passwords everything is encrypted if you're tired of answering security questions to log back into your accounts like what year your great-uncle was born in or what's the middle name of your cat wait your cat has a middle name well with LastPass all your passwords are stored so no worries you can check out the link in the video description if you are interested if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watchinghello everyone and welcome a portion of this video is sponsored by LastPass we'll get into that at the end so let's jump right to our topic how efficient are tesla's now I'm not talking about mpg ratings here anyone can look up efficiency ratings the 2018 model 3 performance is rated at 116 mile per gallon combined equivalent but what I'm curious about is how much energy that starts in the battery actually makes it to the wheels to push the car forward so we're looking for a percentage what percentage of battery power goes towards useful work as in actually moving the car now this turned out to be quite challenging to figure out collecting the data is very difficult you have to make certain assumptions and you know the real world has a lot of variables that are pretty tough to control but that's not going to stop us so let's dive right in the first method I thought would be rather simple to implement was to just look at my energy efficiency while driving at a certain speed and then calculate my losses at that speed whatever energy is left over is the energy that's either lost as heat or to power the onboard electronics transmit data use the eight cameras and many proximity sensors and so on so I started with the data I had from my 2,000 mile road trip that I took my model 3 on last summer on that trip I traveled 1963 miles and used 560 kilowatt hours of energy to do so that's an average of about 285 watt hours per mile now most of the trip was spent on the highway with cruise control sitting at 75 miles per hour highway efficiency averaged around 290 watt hours per mile ranging from about 270 to about 310 that was in pretty ideal temperatures high 70s low 80s but almost always the AC was on and set to auto so if I know my efficiency is 291 hours per mile and I know my speed is 75 miles per hour I can calculate a few things first we're calculating how much energy we need to overcome aerodynamic drag in this case we're using 290 watt hours to travel one mile so let's see how much of that energy is needed to travel one mile for aerodynamics alone energy equals four times distance we know the equation for force we simply plug in the numbers now I'm going to use atmospheric pressure and all usual metrics I generally go with for the drag coefficient Tesla states its point two three and for the frontal area I'm using twenty five point five square feet which I found from someone who 3d modeled the vehicle more on this number later once we convert our units to watt hours we get one hundred sixty seven point eight watt hours per mile now for rolling resistance we take our weight in this case there were two people in the car plus a ton of extra stuff so we've got four thousand five hundred seventy two pounds total we multiply that by our rolling resistance coefficient this is often around 0.015 so we'll plug that in and we get one hundred thirty six point four now this number is super close to the arrow number because the car is really heavy meaning lots of rolling resistance but also super aerodynamic meaning low arrow drag usually these numbers would be further apart but you've probably already realized one hundred sixty seven point eight plus one hundred thirty-six point four is greater than two hundred ninety watt hours per mile our original efficiency to find out how efficient our vehicle needs to be we take the total energy we need for steady-state 75 mile per hour driving divided by the total energy we used and we find out the powertrain is 105 percent efficient at the very least oh boy so multiple things here are wrong the rolling resistance is probably wrong it's probably better as Tesla seeks tires that have good rolling resistance in this case bespoke Michelin Pilot Sport 4s the air density is based on standard pressures it's likely a bit off and our frontal area is from some random simulation on the internet so that's probably wrong too so let's get better data now the first thing that troubled me here is the frontal area and you might just be like Jason why don't you just measure it it's really not something that's very easy to measure I thought about taking a string and going around the widest section of the car but you still have to get the shape right or the area is wrong I asked Tesla for the figure and they were happy to chat but ultimately only provided basic dimensions like width and height but maybe that's all I really need so there was a very cool study done by car and driver and in this study there is a Tesla model as tested which they note has a frontal area of 25.2 square feet I know the width and height of the Model S I know it's frontal area and I know the width and height of a Model 3 so if conveniently the Model S and Model 3 were to have a very similar shape for frontal area which an overlay of the front profile shows quite obviously then we can simply use ratios to get a pretty good idea of what the model threes frontal area is using ratios we can guesstimate the model threes frontal area is about twenty-three point six nine feet squared nice so now that we have a better idea of frontal area my goal was to collect a bunch of efficiency data in order to do this I drove around pretty aimlessly until I had found some straight flat farmland I then used the on-board computer to measure energy efficiency over a two mile straightaway to compensate for wind and elevation changes I then did the two miles in the opposite direction and averaged with the first number I did this multiple times for multiple speeds until finally I built myself a bit of a speed versus fuel efficiency comparison now the only variable that is not stock about this vehicle is that it's currently on a set of winter wheels and tires obviously this has an effect but I don't think it's going to be that large of an effect for various reasons first Wiener tires have higher rolling resistance than summer tires but I saw a quote from Continental that winter tires can now match the rolling resistance of performance summer tires and in some cases they're even better this car comes standard with Michelin ps4s tires and based on the data I've seen rolling resistance numbers are actually pretty similar but there's also the aerodynamic drag portion of a wheel these obviously aren't going to be as aerodynamic as something with a wheel cover however this is the model 3 performance which comes with large 20-inch wheels these are 18-inch wheels and they're lighter overall it's something important to know but also something that likely won't have massive impacts on the overall efficiency numbers so at 50 miles per hour I saw 213 watt hours per mile at fifty five to thirty one at sixty to sixty one point five at sixty five to seventy six point five and at seventy miles per hour 307 watt hours per mile overall say the quality of the data I recorded looks decent it has some flaws but thankfully the trend is in the right direction and overall with an increase in speed there is an increase in energy required if we look at the total energy use side-by-side with the amount of energy required for aerodynamic drag we can see the corresponding bump and aerodynamic drag causes a similar increase in total energy consumption now there's a lot of numbers that go into these calculations so for a detailed explanation of how they're derived check out the video description I do wish the data were a little cleaner but driving out in the real world means it's very difficult to control all variables now more importantly what can we learn from this so if we look at a chart of total energy required to travel one mile at a certain speed in blue side by side with the amount of energy required to overcome aerodynamic drag in red and rolling resistance in yellow we can start to get an idea of how efficient the overall vehicle is if we overlay the aerodynamic energy required on top of the overall plus the rolling resistance on top of the overall the remaining blue space is the energy required for everything else that's happening that means climate control which in this case was off the speakers again in this case off but other things that are always running such as onboard computers the screens camera monitoring not to mention of course the drivetrain efficiencies the power comes from the battery through the inverters to the motors through a gear reduction box all the related bearings and of course this is an all-wheel drive vehicle so it's sent to all four wheels essentially what this graph is showing us is our worst case powertrain efficiency because here's how much energy we know we need at a minimum to cover one mile at seventy miles per hour and here's how much energy it actually took to do so so if we divide the needed energy by the total energy we get a percentage we can do this for each of our five tests and then take the average of those five results and we get a minimal efficiency of nearly seventy one percent seventy one percent now perhaps that number doesn't mean much to you that twenty nine percent of total energy remaining goes towards losses running on board systems all wheel drive things of that nature but let's say we had a gasoline vehicle with the same size and shape as the slit they got 40 miles per gallon on the highway at 70 miles per hour and 40 miles per gallon is pretty good for a gasoline engine well in that case the minimal system efficiency of the gasoline vehicle achieving 40 miles per gallon would be just 26.6% in this hypothetical scenario the Tesla is 266 percent more efficient if you're curious about the total efficiency from deriving the energy meaning power production all the way to the wheels I have a separate video covering this in detail linked in the video description now maybe at this point you're not happy with the data I've collected and you're thinking this is all nonsense fair so I found some Car and Driver data where they tested their long range all-wheel drive Tesla Model 3 with the arrow cover wheels at Chelsea proving grounds so all of their testing was done on a 4.7 mile oval eliminating elevation changes traffic and for the most part wind as variables affecting the results the one caveat is that their testing was done in 44 degree weather with the climate control on set to auto at 72 degrees with the arrow wheels their efficiency numbers were 250 watt hours per mile at 50 miles per hour 310 at 70 miles per hour and 405 at 90 miles per hour taking the average of their results the minimal system efficiency was 70 point 8 percent surprisingly close to my average calculated at 70 point 6 6 percent now they obviously had an aerodynamic advantage from the wheels and are using all season tires which likely have less rolling resistance but they also have climate control running while it's 44 degrees outside if you were to turn the climate control off in this scenario it's not too difficult to imagine seeing system efficiencies greater than 80 percent overall the Tesla's efficiency is quite quite impressive hence according to the EPA the Tesla Model 3 standard range plus with a combined 141 mile per gallon equivalent rating is currently the most energy efficient car for sale in the u.s. today well done now again thanks to last pass for sponsoring a portion of this video LastPass is a password management tool that remembers all of your passwords so that you don't need to this means you can use a different password for every website which is vital for security but that of course means it's difficult to remember all of them no longer a problem now I started looking into the number of accounts that I use and it turns out I'm using over 130 different username and password combinations for various websites and platforms so the whole idea of LastPass is that you have one very difficult long password to log into your account and then you don't have to remember all of the other passwords and LastPass doesn't actually have access to your passwords everything is encrypted if you're tired of answering security questions to log back into your accounts like what year your great-uncle was born in or what's the middle name of your cat wait your cat has a middle name well with LastPass all your passwords are stored so no worries you can check out the link in the video description if you are interested if you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below thanks for watching\n"