“The bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created. Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon.”
It’s always funny to see people die a little bit on the inside when you point out that the overwhelming majority of the energy their car consumes is spent on moving it around, rather than them.
I get that that grabbing a bicycle just isn’t an option for a lot of distances but if everybody just moved to a motorcycle or legitimately small car in the cases whey they just move themselves around, this would already solve a non trivial amount of problems we currently have in terms of resource usage and traffic density.
In the case of cars with infernal combustion engines, it’s even worse. Even for very efficient road car engines, more than 50% of the energy in the fuel is expelled as waste heat, through either the exhaust or cooling system. Of that smaller than 50% fraction, indeed most of the energy is spent overcoming aerodynamic drag of the car body, and friction from the tires.
Sidenote: F1 made headlines a while back they had achieved >50% thermal efficiency, with an incredibly complicated hybrid system that recovered excess exhaust energy from the turbo.
Nice
It gets better: a human on a bike is the most efficient mode of locomotion there is in terms of mass moved per unit of energy invested.
It’s always funny to see people die a little bit on the inside when you point out that the overwhelming majority of the energy their car consumes is spent on moving it around, rather than them.
I get that that grabbing a bicycle just isn’t an option for a lot of distances but if everybody just moved to a motorcycle or legitimately small car in the cases whey they just move themselves around, this would already solve a non trivial amount of problems we currently have in terms of resource usage and traffic density.
In the case of cars with infernal combustion engines, it’s even worse. Even for very efficient road car engines, more than 50% of the energy in the fuel is expelled as waste heat, through either the exhaust or cooling system. Of that smaller than 50% fraction, indeed most of the energy is spent overcoming aerodynamic drag of the car body, and friction from the tires.
Sidenote: F1 made headlines a while back they had achieved >50% thermal efficiency, with an incredibly complicated hybrid system that recovered excess exhaust energy from the turbo.
Talk about hell on wheels!
Link to source?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-human-on-a-bicycle-is-among-the-most-efficient-forms-of-travel-in-the/