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Current lithium batteries Tesla - 270+Wh/kg, cheap AliBaba - 250+Wh/kg. Gasoline/jet fuel - 12KWh/kg, with 30% thermodynamic efficiency - 3.6KWh/kg. If one takes into account piston engines weight and their expensive maintenance or how expensive jet engines overall, the electric seems to have a very good niche of short range planes, and for multi-rotor VTOL it is unbeatable.

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Factor in complete system requirements—cooling, casings, and safety systems—that 270 Wh/kg battery delivers only 170-180 Wh/kg of usable energy.

Jet fuel still maintains an 18-19× energy density advantage (3.2 kWh/kg vs. 0.17 kWh/kg) at the system level, which explains the fundamental range limitations we're seeing in electric aircraft development.

For VTOL applications specifically, it demands 2.5-3× more energy per mile than conventional flight, electric air taxi prototypes remain limited to 60-80 mile ranges—impressive engineering, but not yet practical for replacing most aviation applications.

I'm sorry, what? That is an absurd assertion. Batteries are incredibly efficient, like 95-99% discharge efficiency for capacity. They're already bad for this use case, exaggerating it just makes you look bad.

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