When rolling down a hill with regenerative breaking, the car is generating 50kW.
You can literally power many average homes with that.
It's not ridiculous until you compare against people doing it manually.
also, teslas are really quite efficient and it's amazing how they recover energy as well.
I wonder if there are efficiencies to be had recovering energy to come, since they can only recover what the batteries can absorb.
Thrusting a car through air at 100kph though, that takes a lot of work. Drag scales with the square of the velocity and proportionally to the frontal surface area.
Cars are a fast, but woefully inefficient means of transport.
Drag force scales with the square of velocity. Drag power (rate of work or rate of energy consumption) scales with the cube of velocity.
One of these is not like the other. Pedalling a bike doesn't come even close.
Humans consume several million calories per day at most, now as a rule of thumb a million calories is about the same as a kWh. And the only reason they consume that much energy is because the human body is inefficient at converting this heat to work. Even the best cyclists struggle to produce anything more than a few hundred watt.
More to the point, humans struggle to power a light bulb, let alone a house.
The human body does not convert heat to work. We do something entirely different (look up the "ATP/ADP cycle").
But yeah there are certainly conversion losses in the conversion of egg sandwiches to labor. 25% or so. Which is actually pretty good; you won't be able to match that with a steam machine built over the weekend (start with solving the problem of setting eggs on fire?).
I think teslas are pretty efficient:
https://forum.abetterrouteplanner.com/blogs/entry/22-tesla-m...
A model 3 LR uses less than 100 watt hours to go 1 mile at 25mph
I wonder how efficient bikes become at higher speeds with respect to drag coefficient (without a streamlined fairing)