A Unified Energy Survival–Conversion Law for Cars, Buses, Trucks, Ships, and Vehicle Systems: A Thermodynamic Framework Beyond Classical Efficiency

Reported energy conversion efficiencies in biological, mechanical, electrical, and computational systems consistently overestimate useful energy delivery under real operating conditions, often by factors of two to ten. This discrepancy arises because conventional efficiency metrics isolate individual components under idealized steady-state conditions, while real systems operate through sequential absorption, transport, transformation, regulation, and dissipation pathways, each subject to irreversible entropy production imposed by the second law of thermodynamics. Here we introduce a Unified Energy Survival–Absorption–Conversion Law that replaces single-scalar efficiency with a physically grounded energy survival factor: Ψ=AE/TE+ε where AE denotes absorbed, potentially useful energy, TE represents recoverable thermodynamic and transport losses, and ε captures irreversible entropy-generating losses. This formulation explicitly separates recoverable and non-recoverable energy degradation and enforces the thermodynamic bound 0