Based on this chart, electric car is a best way to burn calories
If you’re charging it with your own muscles, sure. Or you could just put rocks in your panniers.
The joke is that calorie is a unit of energy, and it’s the car that’s “burning the calories” instead of your body
This kills the
crab.
Maybe the most surprising thing here is that regular biking is still twice as efficient as e-biking even given our mediocre metabolic efficiency and a physique that isn’t exactly designed for the bicycling motion.
it also has the Ebike going ~40% faster which means almost twice as much friction to overcome.
Seems to be meaningful that all of the speeds should be the same.
To be meaningful, they should reflect the real-world imo. Which I they attempt to do? 18km/hr seems really slow for non-ebike (my last commute home by acoustic bike before I got an ebike was 27.0 km/hr), but I guess casual riders might go that speed?. If you use a class 3 ebike in the US, the ebike speed is also really slow (for class 1/2, its about right - I typically get 26km/hr). In Europe, speeds are typically less than the US for ebikes. And I think European urban speed limits tend to be less than US? Of course there’s also traffic, so there are times when cars average less speed than bikes. Depending on location and time of year, how intensely the AC/heater in the car is running may significantly impact traffic fuel efficiency. They could have just included a few different speeds for each option, I suppose.
If you want to apply it to CO2, you need to convert that energy into CO2, but that’s also really dependent on energy source. Coal power will be a lot worse than solar and wind. Typical US beef will be a lot worse than chicken or wheat or solar/wind energy. So, you would need a second chart and then do the calculations. For the average person whose ebike speed and acoustic bike speed are nearly the same, the ebike is better in terms of CO2. If someone gets specifically cleaner energy sources, then it would be a lot better. OTOH, someone connect to a grid that’s mostly fossil fuels, but eats a low-CO2-emitting diet, the acoustic bike might be slightly better.
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It makes sense to me…
For example if the the e-bike rider had to spend 1/5 of the energy of the unpowered cyclist (numbers chosen for the example’s sake) that would be 1.1Wh/km they exert.
The remaining 12.9Wh/km would be what was discharged from the battery while riding (from using pedal assist and/or throttle features). This can be measured when you charge it back up at the end of the trip to the previous level.
Really had to drop that car speed down to make a meaningful chart huh?
Wdym? The faster a car moves (or anything, not just a car) the less efficient it’s gonna be, because it has to fight against more and more wind resistance.
They’re saying that at highway speeds the cars energy usage would be off the chart, or if they scaled the chart to that usage, everything else would be too small to discern the differences.
You guys are in agreement.
Aaah, I get it now, thanks!
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Is this actually an empty comment or is something wrong with my client?
The measure of productivity of transportation is distance traveled, not speed (unless this were some time race). Comparing kw/speed tells you nothing about the kWh used to make the same trip as alternative modes of transportation.
In theory I agree, in practice other stuff, as the need for heating/cooling, really muddled the theory and puts the sweet spot speed way up. And if we turn the Aircon off, 150 is a really high number.
Wdym? The faster a car moves (or anything, not just a car) the less efficient it’s gonna be, because it has to fight against more and more wind resistance.
That isn’t entirely true. At lower speeds there may be other inefficiencies that are worse than wind resistance (since wind resistance becomes negligible at low speeds).
It will depend on the vehicle, but for example, small gasoline cars are more efficient at ~70 km/h than at lower speeds. Electric vehicles will likely be more efficient at lower speeds (~40 km/h) than gas vehicles, due to (lack of) gearing but there will still be low speeds where they are less efficient than higher speeds.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/ehicle-energy-economy-at-different-speeds_fig1_326822085
Besides the other comment being right about air resistance, a speed of around 40 km/h is considered safe in urban environments and artificial obstacles are now being placed to lower traffic speed to about that limit. Also, the mean speed is also around that in towns where you either go faster than the limit or go 0 in a traffic jam
What would the energy usage be if all of them were going the same speed?
More importantly, the KWH used to go the same distance. Sure a car uses more power… It’s going faster, and gets to its destination faster, therefore using power for less time.
Energy is measured in KWH, people. But yeah, your point about normalizing to the same speed to make the comparison fair is good.
It’s still inaccurate though. Even at (slow) highway speeds my Ioniq uses slightly less than 150wh per km, if I drove a constant speed of 45km/h I could easily hit under 80wh per km
Looks like trains are about 50wh/km
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/most-energy-efficient-mode-zero-emission-urban-transport-kmeť
I couldn’t find any info on planes, but that’d be interesting to see how massive that would be too.
It’s that normalized by passenger or is that just the train?
Normalized by passenger, certainly. However, it’s easier to hit passenger capacity in a train than in a (private) car.
Wait the private car isn’t normalized as 1 person per car or 1.2 average people per car?
Deeply suspicious framing if that’s the case.
You misunderstood me. For one, I simply assumed that locomotives have big engines for a reason and thus the number can’t be calculated for the entire train. For two, when I mentioned the capacity of cars, I meant maximum passenger capacity. I said that because at maximum passenger capacity, cars become a reasonable means of transportation whereas normally, they are ridiculously inefficient.
The 50 is normalized to passenger. I think it’s 30 per seat, but I guess they don’t fill all the seats usually.
The car is correctly represented, about 0.15 KWh / km is what one gets.
However, the positioning of the e-bike looks strange to me. I’ve looked at previous studies and the e-biker has always been first in efficiency - because the efficiency of a motor far exceeds the efficiency of human digestion and muscles, while weight and speed remain comparable to an ordinary cyclist.
I think someone has calculated food energy incorrectly, or assumed that e-bikes move faster than they do. :)
I guess it’s hard to gauge an e-bike since they often have a variety of operating modes ranging from progressively higher levels of pedal assist up to full throttle. But that’s fascinating to think that an all-electric ride may actual consume less energy in the grand scheme of things. I had never looked at it that way!
I think many people peddle just as hard on an electric bike, so the 5.5 kWh/km is a given, the rest is the energy required to go faster. Since air resistance increases with the square of the speed, it might very well be the case that 14 kWh/km at 25 km/h is more efficient than what the human alone would need to deliver for the same speed.
Edit: I failed to take into account that for the human at the same level of effort the power remains constant, not the energy per kilometer. Going faster at the same power output would reduce the energy expenditure per kilometer for the human to about 4 kWh/km, which would indicate that 10 kWh/km is being delivered by the motor to go faster.
That being said, it might be the case that they just calculated the energy needed to move the bicycle without taking the energy efficiency of the digestive system into account.
I just did a quick of my statistics. My bike typically provides an average of 100W in my hilly 28km commute (both ways) that takes about 1h15 minutes. That’s less than 5Wh/km.
I’m using a fairly high setting, too, and judging by the fact that I don’t break a sweat at all, I’m 100% sure I’m not pedaling as hard as I do on a regular bike.
This should be shown in Km/Wh so the more efficient the modes of travel show as bigger bars.
yes, I thought it was backwards and was quite surprised
This data needs to be normalized by speed or realistic range/day. Otherwise it’s pretty meaningless.
It is totally pointless, I am totally on side of bikes and walkable cities, but this chart is pointless. What battery stores and what humans use is not comparable, and adding combustion engine car/bus/train here would throw the chart to totally other scale. Train has enough kWh to power a small town, but it carries shit ton of load.
Like most “fuck cars” memes it’s only relevant if you’re a young single person with no hobbies who never travels more than 5km from their home without taking public transport.
Energy efficiency and carbon footprint are very different things - pretty sure the carbon footprint of 15 big macs (8500kcal) is substantially greater than 1L of gasoline (let alone an electric grid equivalent)
A quick googling tells me a burger is about 3kg of CO2 equivalents. 1L of gas seems to be about 2,5kg.
Now if you were to eat local and seasonal food I’d guess you can get more efficient than burning oil.
Now do one where you A) normalize this to the same trip distance (not speed, so that these choices for a single trip become meaningfull) and B) convert the kWh into CO2 emissions, including the emissions in growing and transporting the various power and food production methods used (coal to solar, locally produced veggies-air shipped beef)
It’s already normalized to distance, the graph is showing kWh/km. The speed is just there for additional context.
Trip distance is dependent on methods of transportation at the aggregate level. That’s only relevant for policy decisions or collective actions, not individuals of course, but if we are going to deal with climate change, collective action is necessary.
Given the graph is normalized by km traveled, its overly generous to cars.
Yeah, if you account for the amount of CO2 that goes into producing food the ebike will be much more efficient in terms of co2/km than a regular bicycle. Even if you cheat by making the regular bicycle drive slower than the ebike, like they did for this chart.
Let me just travel 30km to the shops by foot and carry shopping home another 30km back again
Have you heard of this miraculous thing called public transit? And there are things called panniers which are pretty cool too.
But frankly, if you don’t have groceries within walking distance, your neighborhood and your zoning laws are very poorly designed.
And that’s deliberate. Neighborhoods around the world are designed to require cars to live in, because of oil company lobbying, and also for “security”, in order to keep out people too poor to own cars.
Getting rid of cars requires changing the various ways our cities are designed to make cars necessary. That’s worth doing too.
Living outside land of the free, I have like 4 grocery stores and 1 supermarket within 15min walking distance, and I don’t live in a dense neighborhood.
I don’t live in a city.
I used to live in a place that was somewhere between suburb and rural and I loved not being around people but I hated not being able to walk to get basic necessities. Now I live in the city and I have everything I could ever need within a 15 minute walk and I get to choose whether I pay for a car, a licence, plates, insurance, gas, maintenance and repair. This system really has us fucked into believing that this is the way it should be.
Can confirm. It takes an hour to walk to the city. I have 3 grocery stores within 10 min of walking (checked with Google maps too)
In this graph a bus would be a lot worse than a far given the massive size, aerodynamic brick wall, and constant stops.
Yeah but you have to divide the footprint by the average number of travelers.
Which in non city environments with high frequency is often only a handful to a dozen at most. Not that it matters, as this graph doesn’t show or or try to compare per person, only calories per vehicle mile.
My neighborhood pre-dates cars
It might’ve had grocery stores in it before, or tiny lawn stores and such. It might’ve also just been very poorly designed.
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That means the urban planning in your area is garbage. That is fixable and has to be fixed.
Wouldn’t go as far as calling it urban, it’s a few streets on a mountain
A few streets on a mountain can and should have a grocery store. For the occasional specialized needs, rural residents can use comparatively inefficient modes of transport because of their relatively small number. There’s still a huge margin for better efficiency and planning.
there’s always outliers. don’t worry noone is saying you need to walk in those circumstances
Also carry 4 other humans with you when you go
Yeah, micro mobility is great on paper when you’re young and live in an accessible city with flat topography. Years ago I became (and still am) a bicycle commuter and I am ENTIRELY SICK OF IT. I want a fucking car. I am tired of biking in the rain and the snow and the cold. It fucking sucks.
Also If I didnt have the ability to purchase an e-bike recently I’d be fucked with the terrain of the place I am currently stuck living (and even that doesn’t quite cover the situation).
Also I am tired of minor injuries compounding year over year due to the simple fact that I am using my body as both the engine and support structure to move myself, vehicle and cargo around just to live.
It was fun 10 years ago but now I’m just like give me a fucking cargo van.
Urban planning issue
No amount of urban planning can solve a 300 year old city built in a 10,000 year old hilly mess of a glacial valley.
ebikes with regenerative braking could do very well in that environment. Try taking a look at what’s within 15 minutes by bike
I know what’s 15 minutes away by bike because I bike everywhere I go. Doesn’t change the fact that I am sick of it.
Walk a bit. Take a bus. Buy an electric scooter. Move. All decent options
I’ve been telling everyone how most people don’t need a car in a big enough city (I’m in Europe), and how much more efficient (PROPER) public transport is.
…And then I get the work commute metro trains where stupid/inconsiderate/disgusting people still get on the packed train despite being sick, keep standing in my kidney and sneeze/cough at others (without a mask, of course) and sniff their nose all the way. Every single time when that happens I dream about having my own car where I don’t have to deal with this (or an idiot blasting TikTok from their speakers, being drunk+loud, smelly, etc.).
I still won’t have a car, but man, sometimes the right decision isn’t the easiest.
I live in a city with very good public transport which I use constantly. I also have an E-bike.
However, one needs to note that if I buy something big (extra lot of groceries, a new computer, a painting, anything that doesn’t fit in a backpack), using PT is pretty inconvenient. Especially when I’d be faster just carrying the thing home from Ikea, since I only live some 2km away, but the bus routes don’t go across the boroughs (but radially from the center outwards, with a few “lateral” buses), so I’d take two buses and it’d be some 10km. And if it’s raining and I have an item that shouldn’t get wet…
Also, taking a cat to the vet for instance.
I’m just waiting on when public transport will be supplemented with small city EV-s you can rent for a few hours cheaply. Like those e-scooters, but small cars, and with more regulations.
I know an apartment building which gives the tenants (mostly young students) the option to reserve and rent an EV for just a few euros an hour. And you don’t need to fill the tank, so it’s pretty nice.
Had a neighbour in his 80, had multiple leg operations and he still used to take a daily bike ride to keep fit. Not to mention that even if bike commutes suck, they improve your mental health considerably, even if you go in the rain/cold.
And most importantly of all, those who can take the bike cover those who can’t. So please enjoy your car ride, but take the bike when you can.
Do you personally commute by bike 100% of the time for literally every outing to get to work or run errands? Because I do, and have for a decade. I’m over it.
Sounds like it should keep you fit.
What kind of injuries?
Also I am tired of minor injuries compounding year over year due to the simple fact that I am using my body as both the engine and support structure to move myself, vehicle and cargo around just to live.
I’m sorry you’re getting pushback and criticism for this. As someone who physically can’t bicycle and struggles with mobility, I strongly support well designed and well maintained walkable communities, bicycle infrastructure, and effective public transit. And I recognize that, for some people, the basic right to travel and work and generally function in society requires personal car ownership.
That doesn’t mean I sympathize much with people who live in subdivisions off major highways with no grocery stories within twenty miles - there shouldn’t be any community anywhere designed to require car ownership.
But I also don’t sympathize much with people who want to ban all personal vehicle ownership from their little 15 minute utopias. Disabled people exist.
I agree with this. Cities shouldn’t be car exclusive, but eliminating cars completely would also alienate villagers and people living in rural areas, in addition to disabled people.(written by an european who has family in those regions)
Preach it.
I am old enough where these sorts of points have much heavier weight. I can bike, but my body is not happy after any non-trivial distance.
I now have my eye on an electric recumbant trike. It solves all of my ergonomic (back) issues, and the electric would help with some of the terrain struggles and help me more accurately predict travel time. Plus, there’s a bit more storage for, e.g., a change of clothes for the destination. They’re damned expensive, though, even the cheapest.
Doesn’t solve the weather issue, but I’m sure someone makes a version that has a shell; at which point you’re essentially just driving around a small, slow, electric car with a lot of limitations.
I’m still going to replace my bike with a recumbent, though. My body just can’t handle that position for prolonged periods anymore.
Interesting. I’ve never owned an electric car, but just guesstimating based on those numbers, my daily commute would cost something like 25 cents in electricity. Not too shabby.
I did buy an ebike a few years back and watched to see how much the bill went up, but frankly never noticed any change. At 2 cents per day, it’s basically a rounding error relative to other electrical usage, so that makes sense to me now.
Where’s the gas car on here? How about steam locomotive?
If I’ve got to go 300+ miles through the US I’m probably not going on foot or by human power.
If you need to travel that distance, take a fucking train.
Lol. Sounds good. My little brother lives in Birmingham, AL and I live in West Lafayette, IN. My sister lives in Fishers, IN and my in-laws are at one of the northernmost suburbs of chicago. I invite you to propose me travel solutions for my wife and two children under 5 which are better than my electric car.
For reference:
West lafayette to Birmingham: 875 km
West Lafayette to Fishers: 112 km
West Lafayette to North of chicago: 260 km
I would LOVE to take the train or bike or walk. But I think people like you and OP might be underestimating the hostility toward (and unavailability of) public transit in the US outside of Metro areas. I appreciate that there are better answers than my electric car, but it’s better than getting in my double wide and double tall diesel truck, no?
My ebike goes 40 km/h.
I believe most e-bikes in Europe are limited to 25km/h. 32km/h in Canada.
Depends on the country and the type of ebike.
same in australia
Mine goes up to 35 km/h when is freshly charged, down 75% of battery to 30 km/h.
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Thanks a lot for linking the source!
