Nit pick: battery technology only needs to equal about 25-30% the raw energy density of fuel to equal the density of fuel in terms of useful work output.
That’s because electric motors can be as high as 98-99% efficient at converting electric power into work while small internal combustion engines peak out at about 35% and that’s generous. 20% is more typical. Then for ICE you have additional losses in the transmission that don’t happen for electric.
The vast majority of the energy in liquid fuel heats the air around the car.
This is also why a normal sized EV powered entirely by coal fired electricity can emit less carbon per mile than an efficient ICE car or even a hybrid. A big supercritical steam turbine in a coal power plant is going to be well over twice as efficient at converting heat into useful work than a small ICE. (Few people get all their power from coal, which is the worst case for CO2 emission, so in practice EVs are pretty much always lower carbon.)
> battery technology only needs to equal about 25-30% the raw energy density of fuel
"only" is doing a lot of work here, current lithium batteries are under 1 MJ/kg while good ol car gasoline is at 40+ MJ/kg
top fuel dragsters run nitromethane which is 4 times less energy dense than regular gas yet the go much faster so clearly there is much more going on than just energy density, like the fact that they have to entirely rebuild their engine every other day. I don't even think energy density is a big deal, it's more about how fast you can convert it into movement, and explosions are very good at that type of large scale conversion
AFAIK the big problem with an electric drag racer is weight/mass. Batteries are heavier than fuel. Electric motors are fantastic at acceleration, but you have to feed them with enough amps to make that happen.
A drag racer doesn't need range, so storing a large volume of energy probably isn't the problem. But having enough batteries to supply enough amperage to get that kind of acceleration is probably adding too much weight to be competitive.
This is also the problem with battery powered aviation. The majority of the energy used in a flight is on takeoff and ascent, effectively lifting all that mass to cruising altitude.
> majority of the energy used in a flight is on takeoff and ascent
That's an exaggeration or a misstatement. Even flying the shortest possible flight (a single takeoff and climb, followed by a descent and landing at a very nearby airport) is overwhelmingly likely to use more total energy in the taxi, cruise, descent, landing, and taxi portions. I looked through some of my datalogs from flights where I flew circuits back to the same airport and the fuel (energy) used for a takeoff and climb to pattern altitude was only rarely more than the fuel used for the rest of the circuit, and that was only when practicing emergency turnbacks from a simulated loss of thrust on takeoff.
The peak power is used on takeoff, but the majority of energy is used in cruise.
superchargers (compressed air), huge sets of staged injectors, low compression ratios, stoichiometric ratio of nitromethane to air (1.7:1 instead of ~14.7:1 like normal petrol!) - as you say, it's about how fast you can convert the liquid to an explosion.
That’s because electric motors can be as high as 98-99% efficient at converting electric power into work while small internal combustion engines peak out at about 35% and that’s generous. 20% is more typical. Then for ICE you have additional losses in the transmission that don’t happen for electric.
The vast majority of the energy in liquid fuel heats the air around the car.
This is also why a normal sized EV powered entirely by coal fired electricity can emit less carbon per mile than an efficient ICE car or even a hybrid. A big supercritical steam turbine in a coal power plant is going to be well over twice as efficient at converting heat into useful work than a small ICE. (Few people get all their power from coal, which is the worst case for CO2 emission, so in practice EVs are pretty much always lower carbon.)
Small heat engines suck.