this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2025
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Maybe just had torque confused with horsepower? That's been the historical trade-off between gas and electric. Sure, its very easy to get an electric motor to jump into action. But it is comparatively difficult to generate the same amount of power with equivalent fuel density.
Much of which is lost to heat when combusted, which is the historical hang-up.
Not that batteries don't have their own heating problems. But the benefit of batteries is that they're an engineering problem we can solve with miniaturization, which we've become incredibly good at. We're at a soft ceiling in terms of engine chemistry. Petroleum is about as refined as we're going to get it. Combustion's math is what it is. Improvements to the efficiency of modern engines have stalled out as an automotive tool, even to the point that a gas engine powering an electric capacitor in a hybrid yields performance improvements over the gas engine just spinning the wheels directly.