We're still pretty efficient while not having wheel shaped limbs. Running like humans works pretty well. So well even that we can chase a lot of animals longer than they can outrun us.

There might be more efficient ways to move but we are pretty well equipped by evolution.

That's a strange comparison. Wheels are incredibly limited in the type of surfaces they can be used on.

Now compare human on bicycle to human driving a car for energy efficiency.

No, it's evolution. Mammals burn a ridiculous amount of energy just existing, so evolutionary pressures tend toward more efficient muscles and body geometry.

Electrochemical reactions in your muscles combined with the mechanical advantage from the geometry of your joints and ligaments is simply more energy efficient than most mechanical or electromechanical systems. On top of that, our learned and evolved kinematic algorithms result in vastly more efficient control. Humans tend to be pretty good at using only exactly as much energy as required for a given action. Overshoot is quite limited compared to robots.

Your suggested actions seem inefficient, but if you look at the actual energy expenditure, mechanical means are much worse simply because mammalian muscle is so efficient.

There's a difference between consistency and efficiency.

I read efficiency as "Energy inputted to accomplish a task", in which case, biological systems are far more efficient than current-day mechanical ones. It's a tradeoff.

If you live in most cities in Italy you have to take a huge hit to your ability to get places (in a reasonable timeframe or at all) if you must do it with a car.

that's a misleading equivalence because you're also not considering the energy it took to grow the plants that produce that oil millennia ago. perhaps comparing to biodiesel or alike would be better. but even then it underestimates the efficiency of the human body, because food contains not only the energy we use, but also the materials to build the body itself. so you'd need to account for the inputs into that biodiesel and then all the extraction of materials and production of the machine itself. biology is amazing

Yessir! I even used AI this week, so I'm adding to the energy death of the universe way faster than if I had done something else. Not to mention my car and other things...

Haha, yes. Track cyclists are a different breed.

Talakhadze's 267 kg clean & jerk from 2021 is somewhere well north of 5kw output (I can't find hard numbers, but possibly even like 7kw) for fractions of a second during the second half of the clean. It's wild stuff.

~3000 watts for 0.75 seconds (not counting pauses)

1HP is actually ~5 horses. There was a test trying to measure it.

https://youtu.be/7qxTKtlvaVE

You wouldn't need any sort of fancy toaster: anything small, rated >= 300W, would deliver cyclingpower from a rider of any skill.