Wall Street Journal: For Maximum EV Efficiency, Stick to 25 Miles an Hour, Ignore Angry Drivers

[The Toecutter]

For maximum EV efficiency, drive a car that has minimal drag, frontal area, and mass.

My electric velomobile uses about 7 Wh/mile to do 30 mph with some light pedaling. There is not a car on the market that could do that. There is not a car on the market that even does 10x that at that speed.

The automobile industry considers efficiency as an afterthought and has been doing so for its history. The industry's benchmark sports cars are designed in a manner that runs counter to their stated purpose in the name of preserving planned obsolescence, corporate aesthetics, and tradition based upon the horse and buggy of yore, which ends up hurting the maximum possible theoretical performance the vehicle is capable of.

There is zero reason some major automaker could not build an electric two-seater that only needed about 60 Wh/mile to cruise 70 mph on the highway and reach 200 mph with stability while only needing 100 horsepower to do so(and then shove 1000+ electric horsepower in it in the interest of performance), or a 5-seater sedan that could do 70 mph on 100 Wh/mile. Universities have built solar-powered prototypes with efficiencies in this ballpark or better. And when you start considering single-person vehicles, 15-20 Wh/mile @ 70 mph on the highway is also theoretically possible.