I read a misguided comment yesterday that keeps bothering me.  The complaint against EVs was that their battery packs only hold as much energy as a gallon or two of gas.

Ok.  My Tesla Model 3 has a 75 kWh battery.  A kWh is about 3.6 million joules (Joules is a basic measure of energy) for a total of 270 megajoules.  A gallon of gasoline has roughly 125 megajoules of energy.

So yeah, the Tesla Model 3 holds only as much energy as a couple of gallons of gas.

Yet.  I can go a lot further in my Tesla than anyone can on two gallons of gas, in just about any car.  This isn’t a bad thing about EVs.  You might get 60 miles on your  250 or so megajoules of gasoline energy while an EV will go somewhere around 250 miles.  Four times (4x) the range.

So for every gallon of gas you burn getting from Point A to Point B in a gas car, you will have to burn three more, mostly given off as “waste heat”, in comparison to an EV.  This is the reason it is so much cheaper to operate an EV.