Republican introduces new bill to end the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric cars

[progree]

18. Can you please quantitatively compare the primary fuel in BTU used to power an electric car

to that of a gasoline-powered internal combustion engine car?

And yes, on the electric car side, I'm well aware of power plant inefficiencies and transmission line losses and charging/discharging battery cycle. I'm an M.S.E.E. that worked 15 years in generation planning, system operations, and transmission planning, so I'm well aware of power plant and transmission system inefficiencies and economics. Had my share of thermodynamic courses too.

An electric motor is far more efficient than an internal combustion engine (a true thermodynamic nightmare, just 15 to 20% efficient in turning the energy in the gasoline into power to the wheels). Much less efficient than all that is involved in power plant fuel -> wheel of an electric car.

Internal combustion engines have thermodynamic limits on efficiency, expressed as fraction of energy used to propel the vehicle compared to energy produced by burning fuel. Gasoline engines effectively use only 15% of the fuel energy content to move the vehicle or to power accessories, and diesel engines can reach on-board efficiency of 20%, while electric vehicles have on-board efficiency of over 90%, when counted against stored chemical energy, or around 80%, when counted against required energy to recharge.[66]

From Wiki ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car

[66] is a study by the Brookings Institution

Or compare the two in costs. More than 2 to 1 gasoline cost vs. electricity cost per mile using recent national averages prices $2.50/gallon and 12 cents/KWH. (Yes, both, and the ratio, vary substantially with locality. And then there is the issue of the increasing prevalence of time-of-use electric rates.).

As for greenhouse gasses,

Charging An Electric Vehicle Is Far Cleaner Than Driving On Gasoline, Everywhere In America, Forbes, 3/14/18
(disclosure: based on a Union of Concerned Scientists report, and written by a contributor, Silvio Marcacci, Energy Innovation: Policy and Technology Contributor, so it's not necessarily Forbes' opinion, or even a journalistic article, but more like an Op-Ed. So I'm not going to characterize this as "according to Forbes" )

https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2018/03/14/charging-an-electric-vehicle-is-far-cleaner-than-driving-on-gasoline-everywhere-in-america/#17e211e471f8

Synopsis: Today, an average EV on the road in the U.S. has the same greenhouse-gas emissions as a car getting 80 miles per gallon (MPG). That’s up from 73 MPG in 2017. And in every corner of the U.S. driving an EV produces significantly fewer greenhouse gas emissions than cars powered only by gasoline.

That said, I shudder at the idea of disposing of all the batteries, and am somewhat aware of potential issues in the supply of certain critical materials like lithium.

Back to economics, one set of numbers that I saw recently say that the savings on gasoline vs. electric costs per mile saves only about $540 / year for a car driven 15,000 miles per year (at $2.50/gallon and 12 cents/KWH). Over 10 years, that's a savings of $5,400 neglecting inflation and the time value of money. Seemingly (to me) not enough to overcome the purchasing cost differential between an EV and its gasoline IC car equivalent.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/constancedouris/2017/10/24/the-bottom-line-on-electric-cars-theyre-cheaper-to-own/#507e33ba10b6

EV's don't hold their resale value well, either, but doesn't offer any quantifications --
https://clark.com/cars/is-it-cheaper-to-own-an-electric-car/

But some articles (such as the clark.com one above) claim that maintenance of electric cars are far less, but I haven't seen anything quantitative that includes the replacement of the battery pack, a multi-thousand dollar expense, or how often that is needed.