Cars are Inherently Inefficient due to their own mass vs the mass of their payload.
Cars are crazy inefficient. The vast majority of the energy you use to drive to and from your work is spent getting the car itself to and from work. The point of the vehicle is not to move the vehicle from here to there, but instead what’s in the vehicle.
Quoting myself here:
According to the Goog, my car weighs a bit over 3375 lbs, but we’ll use that number because it makes things round. The combined weight of my car and me is 3600 lbs. My car weighs 15 times more than me. That means that I use 15 times MORE gasoline moving my CAR down the road than I do moving myself. Using these numbers, 93.75% of the fuel I use is going towards moving the vehicle I’m in (which is not the point) from here to there, while only 6.25% of the fuel I use is going towards moving me (which is the point).
My “good for the environment” Tesla weight 4,400lbs and never hauls more than 10% of that weight in cargo.
That’s why a $2k electric bicycle that, has a 50+ mile range, that weighs less than you do is.
Source
ME: #179 - Feature: Transportation