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Energy carried in the vehicle used per distance traveled -- is the best way to compare the energy used by a vehicle to move from A to B.
My plug-in electric lawn mower uses the equivalent of ~0.9 teaspoon of gasoline PER HOUR. Find me a more efficient powered lawn mower? (It uses about 0.38kWh in an hour of heavy use -- this is 12/1000 of a gallon of gasoline.)
Measure the waste heat from a vehicle, and that will also tell you the their relative efficiencies.
And before you get all over the losses in generation of electricity, there are lots of losses and waste heat in exploration, extraction, transportation, storage, refinement, more storage, more transportation, and more storage again -- before you even put the gasoline in your car. There is probably enough electricity *alone* invested in the gallon of gasoline to run the car 30-60 miles *without* burning the gasoline at all. And there is a lot of natural gas used along the way, as well.
Because, if you insist on adding the carbon used to produce electricity, then the electricity used to extract, move, refine, move again, etc -- all of the carbon in that electricity, gets counted in that gasoline. Ditto for all the natural gas used to produce gasoline.
The second thing is, what if I put solar panels on my roof and/or put up a wind turbine, to generate/offset the electricity used in my electric car? Can you do the same thing with an ICE powered car?
So, the bottom line is, that electric cars are more than 1.5X more efficient, and even if you include the source-to-wheels FOR BOTH, the electric cars are much more efficient.
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