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The reason why this happens is because gasoline is literally concentrated chemical energy. And a gas engine literally ignites that fuel to produce heat and pressure in order to turn the pistons that create thrust.

Even the best gas car is very inefficient at converting the chemical energy in gasoline into useful energy. Nearly all fossil fuel engines use less than 50% of the energy stored in gasoline into actual useful stuff. The rest is waste heat. (It’s why all gas cars have heaters but not cooling)

2/7/26, 3:36 pm2 reposts18 likes

In comparison, electric vehicles run at about 90-95% efficiency. So they will produce far less direct heating to the environment around them. That doesn’t solve, however, the problem with pavement, stores heat energy and can be 20-25º centigrade hotter than the air temperature around it.

@tangentfoxofficial.bsky.social

Notable: coal, oil, natural gas, and nuclear all produce significant excess heat. Each of these use stored energy to boil water in order to create steam to turn a turbine. Thats heat. Hydro and wind turn turbines without steam. And solar converts sunlight directly to electricity.

TangentFoxOfficial