What's even more annoying about that is that between the two names, Volt is more obviously electric-themed but is the less electric vehicle.
And yes, I know that the Volt came first, as the first mass market plug in hybrid in the US market, but that just made the Bolt's name even more confusing.
I like the graph but hate the colors. Too low contrast where correlating the lines to the actual country/category represented takes a lot more examination.
In many areas, fossil fuel energy is much cheaper than electrical energy, so much so that even with heat pumps operating at 300+% efficiency, it was still cheaper to burn fuel than to use a heat pump.
When piped residential gas cost $0.01/cubic foot, and each cubic foot contains 0.3 kWh of energy, that energy price was comparable to 3.3 cents per kWh. So even compared with a electric heat pump that was 300% efficient, that gas would still be cheaper than electricity that cost $0.10/kWh.
Now that gas is more expensive (national average approaching $0.02 per cubic foot), and heat pumps tend to be more efficient, some up to 500%, the simple math starts to favor electric heat pumps, where a 500% efficient heat pump running at even $0.30/kWh is still cheaper than a gas furnace. Basically, the breakeven point has tripled in just over a decade.
Also, as heat pump technology has improved, they are capable of operating efficiently at lower temperatures than before, so that the real world performance more closely matches the simple calculations in those cold climates. Plus because they work better now, the customers are less likely to notice a performance difference in heating.
it takes aboit 30m² of solar pannels to grow what could be grown on 1m² using direct sunlight.
Where can I read more about this? I had thought that solar panels absorb a lot more energy than plants can, and I would think that collecting energy across a wide range of wavelengths and then using that energy to emit only specific wavelengths could give plants more useful light. But I admit I don't know how each is optimized for different wavelengths.
Remember the bailout of General Motors? The US handed over billions of taxpayer dollars to a company that failed to invest properly in its own future, only for them to turn around and reward shareholders with dividends and stock buybacks. Where was the outrage over those subsidies?
The GM bailout wiped out shareholders, who got nothing, and their shares went permanently to zero. They created a new company, primarily as a bailout of customers (new GM assumed the responsibilities relating to warranties, service plans, connectivity/subscriptions), a partial bailout of employees (new GM accepted the collective bargaining agreement with the unions, but closed plants under the terms of that agreement), and to some extent dealers and vendors (there were individual winners and losers in the bankruptcy as a whole). Then they auctioned off the shares of the new company, to at least bring back some money to the taxpayer (recovering about $39 billion out of the $51 billion they spent on the bailout).
Economists talk about moral hazard, and the GM and AIG bailout are actually a good example of "yes we'll save you but it's gonna cost you almost as much as if we didn't."
European honeybees protected by human beekeepers outcompete native pollinators for the nectar and pollen that these plants grow, so that the native pollinators struggle to get enough food.
China has had production EVs with sodium ion batteries for 2 years.
CATL and Changan announced earlier this year that they'd be releasing the first mass produced EV with sodium ion batteries in mid 2026, and that sodium ion model still hasn't launched yet. What other vehicle are you saying beat them to this?
This is why SAF still matters for long-haul flying, even though global SAF supply in 2026 is projected at just 2.4 million tonnes (0.8% of aviation fuel demand) and remains costly. The likely split, the article argues, is batteries for short/regional routes and SAF/e-fuels for longer-haul flying.
I'm cautiously hopeful that we will be able to expand e-fuel production through overcapacity in solar panels, with chemical manufacturing soaking up excess energy generation during the sunniest parts of the day. It's not cost competitive with fossil fuels yet, but in markets where grid energy occasionally drops to negative prices, fixing electrical grid energy into chemical bonds could be both a useful price stabilizer and an affordable drop-in replacement for fossil fuel uses in places where electrification is still not feasible, like most aviation today.
For now, though, most SAF still relies on biological feedstocks, so we're still talking about growing plants to feed into biofuels, rather than absorbing the sunlight much more efficiently and turning it into the same hydrocarbon chemical bonds. Maybe if electric power gets cheap and plentiful enough (at least during the sunny daytime), that will encourage more e-fuel investment.
LFP market share for new vehicles has grown very quickly in the last 5 years. It's both safer and cheaper than the previously dominant chemistry of NMC, so it's a no-brainer for stationary batteries, and cheaper cars, and the energy density is catching up to NMC by adding some manganese in the cathode, to where the related LMFP chemistry might become the dominant chemistry in higher priced performance vehicles.
If we can reduce that demand as we continue to build out renewables, we can decommission fossil fuel power generation at huge rates.
One point the author makes is that the data obscures a real phenomenon where switching from an inefficient fossil fuel source to an efficient renewable to do the exact same task actually already reduces the demand for energy.
For example, switching from a car that gets 30 miles per gallon to an electric that gets 3.3 miles per kWh, for a person who drives the American average of 12,000 miles per year, will switch from 400 gallons of gasoline to 3,636 kWh. The energy content of gasoline is 33.4 kWh/gallon, so that's a drop in demand from 13,364 kWh to 3,636 kWh, a 72.8% drop in energy consumption while not changing any actual behavior.
Similar analysis can be done for replacing on-premise fossil fuel combustion with heat pumps for heating buildings and heating water and cooking food. Each of these ends up bringing off-grid fossil fuel use to on-grid electricity use, so that although there is demand destruction overall, that is still an increase in demand on the grid itself, so that looking at the grid stats alone obscures a huge shift.
And the feedback loop on these accelerating changes will make for interesting, somewhat unpredictable results, if the supply chain for gasoline and diesel starts feeling economic pinch in certain places, it may further accelerate adoption and actually close down certain routes for fossil fuel supplies.
With large scale battery projects being built at record pace, where more than half of the battery capacity on US grids was built in the last 2 years (maybe less), we can expect to see the economics of solar energy also push for accelerated adoption even in the face of regulatory resistance from the Trump administration.
The costs associated with nuclear are so overwhelmingly everything other than fuel that selling fuel isn't going to be a big business, nowhere near the global markets for fossil fuels in actual dollars, even if the market one day approaches the same amount of useful energy in joules or kWh.
Some military tanks are going hybrid, too, despite not really being able to move very far on the electric battery. It's still worth it for idling and running the on-board systems without actually running the fossil-fuel-burning engine, though, and is potentially a stepping stone towards greater improvements in the electric drivetrain for quieter and more energy efficient movement.
And if not why are we even investing in this because those short hop flights frankly need to be eliminated for trains anyway.
Well, islands and other geographical features still exist in some places to provide geographical and geological barriers to train connections between certain city pairs.
If humans can hang glide I don't see why we couldn't use those aerodynamic principles to try to glide a car hooked up to glider wings. It's a real engineering challenge, but I feel like it would be possible to get some distance in a scenario where a car uses its wheels to go fast, drives off a cliff, deploys some kind of glider wings (or drive with the glider wings timed out to where the car gets to the cliff edge right at the point where the wings plus updraft provide enough lift) to get the vehicle to glide a substantial distance.
The large scale batteries generally have to follow safety regulations for fire and electrical safety, as well as vehicle access. Most of these standards require a particular amount of spacing, buffers, setbacks, between components.
I would've expected the ratio to actually shift the other way, where the wheelbase represents a larger percentage of the overall length/width of the vehicle, because American fuel economy regulations actually rewarded vehicles for having larger wheelbases. This killed small cars like the Honda Fit and small trucks like the Ford Ranger.
Also, it seems to be much easier to park vehicles whose front wheels are as far forward as possible. The greater the ratio of wheelbase to overall dimensions, the easier it is to maneuver, and anecdotally it seems easier to maneuver modern cars than cars from 25 years ago.
One story is engineering success. The engineers squeeze out so much more performance per amount of gasoline burned, that the cost of extra weight from a fuel economy standard is significantly less than 25 or 50 years ago. If you chart the fuel efficiency over the same time period, the fleet average fuel economy went from 20 to 34 mpg, even as vehicles were getting more powerful and heavier. A 2026 Camry Hybrid has a 232 hp drivetrain (184 hp from the gasoline engine) that manages to push 3700 lbs 0-60 in 6.8 seconds. Those are sports car stats from the 80's, and yet the modern Camry manages to get 44 miles per gallon in fuel economy. Charting emissions shows an even more pronounced improvement.
Similarly, the rise of electric vehicles has increased the average vehicle weight. Batteries are heavy, and the whole chassis needs to accommodate that.
Another story is unintended consequences from dumb regulations. The fuel economy standards were updated for the 2011 model year to allow a sliding scale where vehicles with larger footprints were allowed to be less fuel efficient. Naturally, smaller vehicles were disincentivized, and compact trucks and compact cars all but disappeared. These regs need to be updated, and we'll see the return of smaller vehicles for those of us who prefer them.
And another story is shifting consumer preferences. For a whole bunch of reasons, Americans have expressed a preference for taller and taller vehicles, where crossover SUVs are much more common than the old wagons, the relative balance of sedans versus SUVs has shifted entirely in favor of SUVs.
How much energy does your employer use cooling your office? How much diesel fuel does your government use?
The point is taking an entire country's energy usage, including for agricultural, industrial, commercial, government, and military use, and divide it by the number of people in that country. You might be better than most, but the goal itself includes trying to reduce the non-residential, non-consumer uses as well.
Add to that, I'd have to upgrade my service entrance and main breaker panel, AND install an external 240-volt outlet just to charge the thing fast enough for me to use it daily,
For whatever it's worth, I kinda regret installing a Level 2 charger for my EV. Turns out I didn't really need it, charging overnight most nights with a normal Level 1 (120V, 10A receptacle driving a 1.1 kW charger) would easily be enough for me. I drive about 200 miles a week, and get about 3.3 miles/kWh, so I need to use about 60 kWh per week. Parking overnight for 12 hours is good for about 13 kWh, so I would just need to remember to plug in most nights when I get home.
But I got the Level 2 charger anyway and just charge once a week basically.
What's even more annoying about that is that between the two names, Volt is more obviously electric-themed but is the less electric vehicle.
And yes, I know that the Volt came first, as the first mass market plug in hybrid in the US market, but that just made the Bolt's name even more confusing.
I like the graph but hate the colors. Too low contrast where correlating the lines to the actual country/category represented takes a lot more examination.
In many areas, fossil fuel energy is much cheaper than electrical energy, so much so that even with heat pumps operating at 300+% efficiency, it was still cheaper to burn fuel than to use a heat pump.
When piped residential gas cost $0.01/cubic foot, and each cubic foot contains 0.3 kWh of energy, that energy price was comparable to 3.3 cents per kWh. So even compared with a electric heat pump that was 300% efficient, that gas would still be cheaper than electricity that cost $0.10/kWh.
Now that gas is more expensive (national average approaching $0.02 per cubic foot), and heat pumps tend to be more efficient, some up to 500%, the simple math starts to favor electric heat pumps, where a 500% efficient heat pump running at even $0.30/kWh is still cheaper than a gas furnace. Basically, the breakeven point has tripled in just over a decade.
Also, as heat pump technology has improved, they are capable of operating efficiently at lower temperatures than before, so that the real world performance more closely matches the simple calculations in those cold climates. Plus because they work better now, the customers are less likely to notice a performance difference in heating.
Where can I read more about this? I had thought that solar panels absorb a lot more energy than plants can, and I would think that collecting energy across a wide range of wavelengths and then using that energy to emit only specific wavelengths could give plants more useful light. But I admit I don't know how each is optimized for different wavelengths.
The GM bailout wiped out shareholders, who got nothing, and their shares went permanently to zero. They created a new company, primarily as a bailout of customers (new GM assumed the responsibilities relating to warranties, service plans, connectivity/subscriptions), a partial bailout of employees (new GM accepted the collective bargaining agreement with the unions, but closed plants under the terms of that agreement), and to some extent dealers and vendors (there were individual winners and losers in the bankruptcy as a whole). Then they auctioned off the shares of the new company, to at least bring back some money to the taxpayer (recovering about $39 billion out of the $51 billion they spent on the bailout).
Economists talk about moral hazard, and the GM and AIG bailout are actually a good example of "yes we'll save you but it's gonna cost you almost as much as if we didn't."
European honeybees protected by human beekeepers outcompete native pollinators for the nectar and pollen that these plants grow, so that the native pollinators struggle to get enough food.
CATL and Changan announced earlier this year that they'd be releasing the first mass produced EV with sodium ion batteries in mid 2026, and that sodium ion model still hasn't launched yet. What other vehicle are you saying beat them to this?
I'm cautiously hopeful that we will be able to expand e-fuel production through overcapacity in solar panels, with chemical manufacturing soaking up excess energy generation during the sunniest parts of the day. It's not cost competitive with fossil fuels yet, but in markets where grid energy occasionally drops to negative prices, fixing electrical grid energy into chemical bonds could be both a useful price stabilizer and an affordable drop-in replacement for fossil fuel uses in places where electrification is still not feasible, like most aviation today.
For now, though, most SAF still relies on biological feedstocks, so we're still talking about growing plants to feed into biofuels, rather than absorbing the sunlight much more efficiently and turning it into the same hydrocarbon chemical bonds. Maybe if electric power gets cheap and plentiful enough (at least during the sunny daytime), that will encourage more e-fuel investment.
LFP market share for new vehicles has grown very quickly in the last 5 years. It's both safer and cheaper than the previously dominant chemistry of NMC, so it's a no-brainer for stationary batteries, and cheaper cars, and the energy density is catching up to NMC by adding some manganese in the cathode, to where the related LMFP chemistry might become the dominant chemistry in higher priced performance vehicles.
One point the author makes is that the data obscures a real phenomenon where switching from an inefficient fossil fuel source to an efficient renewable to do the exact same task actually already reduces the demand for energy.
For example, switching from a car that gets 30 miles per gallon to an electric that gets 3.3 miles per kWh, for a person who drives the American average of 12,000 miles per year, will switch from 400 gallons of gasoline to 3,636 kWh. The energy content of gasoline is 33.4 kWh/gallon, so that's a drop in demand from 13,364 kWh to 3,636 kWh, a 72.8% drop in energy consumption while not changing any actual behavior.
Similar analysis can be done for replacing on-premise fossil fuel combustion with heat pumps for heating buildings and heating water and cooking food. Each of these ends up bringing off-grid fossil fuel use to on-grid electricity use, so that although there is demand destruction overall, that is still an increase in demand on the grid itself, so that looking at the grid stats alone obscures a huge shift.
And the feedback loop on these accelerating changes will make for interesting, somewhat unpredictable results, if the supply chain for gasoline and diesel starts feeling economic pinch in certain places, it may further accelerate adoption and actually close down certain routes for fossil fuel supplies.
With large scale battery projects being built at record pace, where more than half of the battery capacity on US grids was built in the last 2 years (maybe less), we can expect to see the economics of solar energy also push for accelerated adoption even in the face of regulatory resistance from the Trump administration.
The costs associated with nuclear are so overwhelmingly everything other than fuel that selling fuel isn't going to be a big business, nowhere near the global markets for fossil fuels in actual dollars, even if the market one day approaches the same amount of useful energy in joules or kWh.
Some military tanks are going hybrid, too, despite not really being able to move very far on the electric battery. It's still worth it for idling and running the on-board systems without actually running the fossil-fuel-burning engine, though, and is potentially a stepping stone towards greater improvements in the electric drivetrain for quieter and more energy efficient movement.
Well, islands and other geographical features still exist in some places to provide geographical and geological barriers to train connections between certain city pairs.
If humans can hang glide I don't see why we couldn't use those aerodynamic principles to try to glide a car hooked up to glider wings. It's a real engineering challenge, but I feel like it would be possible to get some distance in a scenario where a car uses its wheels to go fast, drives off a cliff, deploys some kind of glider wings (or drive with the glider wings timed out to where the car gets to the cliff edge right at the point where the wings plus updraft provide enough lift) to get the vehicle to glide a substantial distance.
Seems horribly dangerous but not impossible.
The large scale batteries generally have to follow safety regulations for fire and electrical safety, as well as vehicle access. Most of these standards require a particular amount of spacing, buffers, setbacks, between components.
Has the average ratio changed over time?
I would've expected the ratio to actually shift the other way, where the wheelbase represents a larger percentage of the overall length/width of the vehicle, because American fuel economy regulations actually rewarded vehicles for having larger wheelbases. This killed small cars like the Honda Fit and small trucks like the Ford Ranger.
Also, it seems to be much easier to park vehicles whose front wheels are as far forward as possible. The greater the ratio of wheelbase to overall dimensions, the easier it is to maneuver, and anecdotally it seems easier to maneuver modern cars than cars from 25 years ago.
There are a few different stories going on here.
One story is engineering success. The engineers squeeze out so much more performance per amount of gasoline burned, that the cost of extra weight from a fuel economy standard is significantly less than 25 or 50 years ago. If you chart the fuel efficiency over the same time period, the fleet average fuel economy went from 20 to 34 mpg, even as vehicles were getting more powerful and heavier. A 2026 Camry Hybrid has a 232 hp drivetrain (184 hp from the gasoline engine) that manages to push 3700 lbs 0-60 in 6.8 seconds. Those are sports car stats from the 80's, and yet the modern Camry manages to get 44 miles per gallon in fuel economy. Charting emissions shows an even more pronounced improvement.
Similarly, the rise of electric vehicles has increased the average vehicle weight. Batteries are heavy, and the whole chassis needs to accommodate that.
Another story is unintended consequences from dumb regulations. The fuel economy standards were updated for the 2011 model year to allow a sliding scale where vehicles with larger footprints were allowed to be less fuel efficient. Naturally, smaller vehicles were disincentivized, and compact trucks and compact cars all but disappeared. These regs need to be updated, and we'll see the return of smaller vehicles for those of us who prefer them.
And another story is shifting consumer preferences. For a whole bunch of reasons, Americans have expressed a preference for taller and taller vehicles, where crossover SUVs are much more common than the old wagons, the relative balance of sedans versus SUVs has shifted entirely in favor of SUVs.
How much energy does your employer use cooling your office? How much diesel fuel does your government use?
The point is taking an entire country's energy usage, including for agricultural, industrial, commercial, government, and military use, and divide it by the number of people in that country. You might be better than most, but the goal itself includes trying to reduce the non-residential, non-consumer uses as well.
A gallon of gasoline contains about 37 kWh of energy. A liter would be about 10 kWh.
It takes about 3.3 kWh of energy to produce one pound of beef (7.3 kWh/kg).
So most Western countries consume far more energy per capita than 1500 kWh/month. Transportation is a huge part of it. So is agriculture.
For whatever it's worth, I kinda regret installing a Level 2 charger for my EV. Turns out I didn't really need it, charging overnight most nights with a normal Level 1 (120V, 10A receptacle driving a 1.1 kW charger) would easily be enough for me. I drive about 200 miles a week, and get about 3.3 miles/kWh, so I need to use about 60 kWh per week. Parking overnight for 12 hours is good for about 13 kWh, so I would just need to remember to plug in most nights when I get home.
But I got the Level 2 charger anyway and just charge once a week basically.