Ok, I don't react like this often, but I have to say that this video is complete nonsense! He completely neglects the single most important aspect. That is EFFICIENCY! If you take efficiency into the equation, all of the arguments he brings up for investing in combustion engines instead of electric engines become pointless.
Let's start with the weight/volume thing. He only puts the total energy potential against each other. But he forget's that the average combustion engine is only able to use about 18% to 20% of that energy potential because of the lack of efficiency, while electric engines have about a 85% to 90% of electro-efficiency. They are able to use almost the entire energy potential that is stored in the batteries, so you would need more than 4 gallons of fuel to match those soda cans. Of course, with electric cars, you lose some energy potential when generating the electricity, transporting it and transforming it to storable energy, but all in al electric cars have a total efficiency of about 59% to 62%. That's about 3 times more efficient!
Now let's talk about costs. Because yes, you could spend money on improving the efficiency of combustion engines which would allow it to use more of the energy potential stored in that gallon of fuel. However, the cost of doing that is exponentially more than improving the batteries. Combustion engines are really at the end of their development as they reach the thermodynamic limits. The current F1 engines are really pieces of art with all their technologies. And yes, they are able to achieve an efficiency of almost 60%. A remarkable achievement. But the truth is, the average price of these engines is about 10.5 million dollars. His assumption that spending the same amount of money in the improvement of a combustion engine results in the same amount of efficiency gains is ridiculous! If it was that easy to improve a consumer level combustion engine by 10%, manufacturers would have done it immediately!
But actually, the entire video distracts from the real problem. That is, we shouldn't even use fossil fuels anymore! It is impossible to drive all the cars in the world on biofuel. However, it is possible to drive all the cars on electricity and generate the electricity by combining all the green energy sources we have. In that sense, I do believe that combustion engines are EOL.
That said, I still enjoy F1. And I think F1 still has it's place. Technologies invented in F1 will continue to find it's way to consumer cars to make them more efficient, safer and more enjoyable. And for sure, F1 cars are still way ahead of the electric Fe cars. A FE race is currently just some advanced go karts, driving around a miniature course that lasts about a third of a F1 race. However, it's good that FE exists. This will allow electric car's to become better so that one day F1 could switch to 100% electric as well. And it allows F1 to stop putting such enormous amount of money in developing such immensely complex combustion engines (MGU-H) and put it in other areas that do have a future.
