alt Hacker NewsNo, over 100 years there have been vast improvements in efficiency in ICEVs. In EVs, the curve is mostly flat.
The hope is for better batteries, but developments are excruciatingly slow.
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> over 100 years there have been vast improvements in efficiency in ICEVs. In EVs, the curve is mostly flat.
This may be true, but my family's "daily" ICE vehicle costs us about $0.162/mile to run; our actual daily EV costs about $0.028/mile -- almost one sixth as much. It doesn't matter how much more improvements ICE vehicles achieve, they're not going to catch up to the "mostly flat" EV curve.
EVs are incredibly efficient. It's why aerodynamics matter so much and they all look so weird. The electricity from fossil sources they use is also efficiently generated at scale and in many states, mostly from renewables. It's equivalent to driving an ICE car that gets 200mpg in the absolute worst case.
Crucially the flat EV curve puts them mostly ahead of where ICEVs have been for their entire history.
If you compare a 2012 tesla model s 70D (the most efficient model tesla had then and arguably the gold standard) it had 33.4 kWh/100mi EPA, the 2025 LR is 27.2kWh/100m which is nearly 22.8% less and this while being larger.
What's even crazier is that a tesla 2008 tesla roadster had 28kWh/100mi EPA combined, which is more than today's model S.
Literally there isn't a single combustion car (not including hybrids) which comes anywhere close to this improvement.
Also I don't know about other countries, but I'd argue that in 20 years at least in Europe the fuel economy of diesel cars has gone worse due to emissions, I'm talking about real world usage, regardless of what this WLTP non-sense says.l
> No, over 100 years there have been vast improvements in efficiency in ICEVs. In EVs, the curve is mostly flat
Engine and battery performance are analogous.
> there have been vast improvements in efficiency in ICEVs. In EVs, the curve is mostly flat.
Uh yes, because it's really hard to improve the efficiency of something that is 4 to 5 times as efficient...
The curve is mostly flat for EVs because they started with such high efficiency to begin with. At their best, internal combustion engines are quite terrible so there has been more room to make improvements.
Even so, the vast, vast majority of cars in the past 100 years have had all of the technical innovation of a washing machine (and that might well be underselling the washing machine!).
> developments are excruciatingly slow
10% a year on average, something like that? ICEVs haven't had that kind of incremental improvement in a loooooong time.