Electric vehicles are always more efficient than gas or diesel vehicles, or NOT?
People tell me that they want to dump their little gas car and instead get a large fully electric SUV or truck. Since these are so much more efficient it has to be cheaper to drive them, than any ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) vehicle. These People couldn't be more wrong!
Physics stay the same when it comes to cars, regardless if they are propelled by fuel refined from Dinosaur Juice (crude oil) or use electricity stored in a battery.
Tires still have rolling resistance, if they wouldn't there would be no traction.
The air around us still works against us. We need power to propel something through the air, even while on the ground. A fun fact is that the resistance quadruples when the speed is only doubled. Obviously as the resistance goes up so does the fuel consumption, ICE or electric no difference.
The larger the vehicle the harder it is to push through the air. Smaller cars do way better than larger ones.
Weight also affects fuel consumption. The heavier, like a SUV, will use more fuel than a lighter small car.
These are just a few of the things affecting cars, any car regardless of the power plant.
Why do people think electric cars are more eeficient? Well, because they are. No, I'm not contradicting myself here. But we have to compare apples to apples or better said same size cars to same size cars. Comparing a small gas car to a large electric SUV is not same size, that is comparing Apples to Oranges.
Recently someone told me that their friend owns a Tesla Cybertruck and drove it for 500 miles from Salt Lake City UT to Missoula MT. That friend than said that it cost him less to drive a small gas car on that same 500 mile trip than what he had to spend to fuel the Cybertruck. No doubt about it! That friend is comparing apples to oranges! The explanation is simple, drive a truck on that same 500 mile stretch and tell me how much you spent in fuel. At that point when one compares apples to apples it looks a lot different.
I actually have been driving that 500 mile trip with my Cybertruck before. I even drove it way further as I drove from Missoula MT to Las Vegas NV and back. A total of 2,000 miles. So I exactly knew how much it does cost to fuel a Cybertruck for that trip. And since I made a YouTube video about it, I compared the cost of gas using the Ford F-150 Raptor official fuel consumption to compare to my Cybertruck fuel cost. The result was very interesting.
The cost was exactly the same! Now that said we need to look a little closer. Have you actually ever gotten the fuel mileage advertised on the window sticker while driving "normal"? I never have. There is a simple reason for that... The EPA test cycle uses much lower speeds than what we actually drive, especially on interstate highways. But I did use the official stated fuel mileage for the comparison. If I would have used actual fuel mileage for the calculation the Cybertruck would have been cheaper to drive.
Over the years that I have been driving electric cars only (since 2018), I have found that an electric car costs about 10% less to fuel on a long road trip compared to a similar sized ICE vehicle. That would probably also be the result in the Raptor comparison mentioned before.
Where you get the huge savings is with charging at home, at work or even some other places that offer low cost or even free charging. I found that charging at home saves about 90% compared to a similar sized ICE vehicle. 90%... let that sink in💰.
So the answer is no, not every EV costs less to fuel than a ICE vehicle. But any EV compared to a similar ICE vehicle and driven in a similar way will save you lots of money in fuel cost.
Go check out the comparison video between Rivian R1S and Tesla Model 3 https://youtu.be/Ro-rh8AiN8A