I disagree with this man on his intro material. If you’re looking from first principles, gasoline is actually, for its energy density, an incredibly safe material.

It seems like this crazy dangerous thing, but that’s only because of how much energy is in it. Think about if all you knew about was hydrogen or LNG or propane, and what the gas pumps and storage containers and fuel tanks in the cars, and the process of putting the gas in or getting a can to put in your lawn mower or whatever, look like. Like, you know those videos of someone with a propane-modified car who gets in a fender bender and the whole car suddenly explodes into this massive fireball?

Now imagine someone telling you they have a fuel that’s useful at room temperature, it’s liquid and stays where you put it, and as long as you keep it away from fire and sparks, it won’t ever really do anything. It’s not under pressure. You can spill it on yourself and wash it off and you’re fine. You can work with it every day and it’s not great for you over the long term, but you won’t get any immediate kind of poisoning. Even if you’re near a fire that’s burning it, it won’t do anything toxic unless you’re in an enclosed space with CO building up. You can literally stick it in a can and carry it around, or a bucket if you’re a little bit brave. You can literally rupture the car’s fuel tank and spill it all over the ground, and it’s dangerous, but even then it’s not an automatic explosion. And still, a few gallons has enough energy to throw this massive multi-ton metal monster around at unimaginable speed for hours.

Batteries are the only thing that’s even close, and they have some other advantages, but the “buckets” are super expensive and complicated, and they also have these massive crazy failure modes that are way worse than a gasoline fire, and you have to take incredible precautions with designing your systems to make sure the humans never touch the energy part.

Gasoline is great. There’s a reason that for about 100 years it was the only viable option and the rate of accidents is pretty low even with it in use every day by average everyday idiots on a global scale.