Best battery / driver to use for a 4WD?

Other Hardware Motors, Mechanics, Power and CNC
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Hello! I have almost all the materials i need for a 4WD vehicle , however i cannot find a concrete answer to what battery or other driver would work best with it. I plan on using 2 L298N drivers with 4 1:48 yellow geared motors , with an Arduino Uno R4 Wifi as the microcontroller.
From what i can tell on this forum , the L298N is somewhat inefficient , so i am curious as to if it would be better to get a different motor driver from Amazon that would work with a smaller battery or if i should keep using the L298N.
An immediate option i know would be a bunch of AA batteries for the L298N but apparently they drain quite fast and would likely end up quite expensive. The other options are alot more varied and all have upsides and downsides so i am stuck looking for the most appropriate one for this scenario and if a different driver may be needed.
What i am mainly looking for is a battery that would be able to sufficiently power the vehicle whilst lasting for a good amount of time and not being very expensive to replace , and if a different driver would be needed for it (or if a motor shield on the arduino would perhaps be better?)
This isnt anything professional , its just a little project i wanted to work on , so i can always upgrade to something better if i really wanted to , but for now i just need to find a good setup for powering the motors.
I am still a little new to electronics so i dont really know all the super technical stuff. Thank you!

Image of materials i currently have :

components
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Look at the motor drivers at Pololu and use rechargeable batteries

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The L29x drivers are ancient an very inefficient technology. The drop 2V to over 4V of the motor power and dissipate that power as heat. Check out the heatsinks on those things. If there is a worse choice for a driver, especially with a battery powered device, I don't know what it is. Use them if you must, but there are much better drivers available.

Pololu has a good line of motor drivers and they have good tech support and instructional pages for each of their products.

Choose the motor driver based on the stall current of the motor and the motor supply voltage. The stall current can be several times the running current. The stall current will be drawn, briefly, every time that the motor is started. The stall current should be listed in the motor data sheet.

To choose a battery you need to know the average current that the circuit will draw and how long you want to run the circuit between replacements or charges. That will tell you the capacity required in Amp/hours (or mAh). I double the calculated number because manufacturers specify capacity under ideal conditions and may be a bit enthusiastic in there their specs.

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:+1:

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Will definitely look into this. Thanks!

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