A human body feels heat while in contact with the air, so it is desirable to heat the air. This is what convectional heaters do - they have a developed surface and relatively low temperature to transmit the heat to the air. The radiation power is proportional to the following temperature difference: $Q \propto (T_{heater} ^4 - T_{air} ^4)$, so it can be small. The heater transfers its heat mainly to the air and the air transfers it to the walls.
The radiating heater has small surface, but much higher temperature so its radiating power is the main heat transfer (it works just like a lamp). The infrared waves get on the skin and heat it. Otherwise they get on the walls and heat thick walls. The radiating heater heats the air too, but due to too high temperature this hot air goes straight up and heats the ceiling, so it is poorly mixes with the room air.
What you say is correct in principle, but ignores the important fact that practical car engines are horribly inefficient, and their effeciency changes quite a bit over the range of speed and power required to move the car. Note that this is the point of transmissions. At best they don't loose any power, but they make the overall process more efficient by allowing the gasoline engine to operate at a more efficient point.
In one way, you can look at a hybrid as having a wide-ranging finely adjustable transmission, but there's more to it than that. The efficiency of a gasoline engine is in part related to what fraction of peak power it must put out. If the gas engine is the only mechanical output in the car, then it must be sized to supply peak power. However, most of the time much less than peak power is needed, so the engine often runs at a inefficient point.
With a electric motor available to fill in the when peak power is demanded, the gas engine can be sized smaller and it is easier to make it more efficient over most of the normal operating range. It also allows for the option of not using the gas engine at all at very low power levels where it would be very inefficient. Instead it can effectively be run in bursts of more efficient operation. For example, if the gas engine is 3% efficient at 500 W, but 6% efficient at 1 kW, then you're better off running it at 1 kW half the time instead of at 500 W all the time. With a hybrid, you have this option. With just a gas engine, it's stuck having to produce whatever power is demanded at the moment, regardless of how efficient that is.
I have a Honda Civic hybrid, and I can tell you this stuff really works. I routinely get 50 miles/gallon minimum on the highway, often substantially more. The engine is physically small for the size car, and it has been specially designed to be easily shut down and restarted. Going down a hill, even at highway speeds, the engine often turns off. If the hill is steep enough, the motor is run as a generator and charges the battery. When I get to the bottom of the hill, I can see that for a little while the control system uses the electric motor to keep the car going at the set speed (this is all with cruise control engaged), then eventually gives up and switches on the gas engine. I can feel a slight klunk when that happens, and the charge indicator goes abruptly from discharge to charge.
Best Answer
A ceramic heater works by convective heat transfer, i.e., the energy consumed directly goes towards increasing the kinetic energy of air molecules, which are then blown into the surrounding space. The warmth felt due to such a heater is due to molecules in that warm air colliding with your skin, causing random motion of molecules in your skin due to the collisions.
In contrast, an infrared heater with a tungsten filament or other resistive element that grows red hot works by emitting electromagnetic radiation in the infrared range. The energy consumed by an infrared heater mainly goes into producing that electromagnetic radiation. When that electromagnetic radiation interacts with the molecules of your skin or other surface, it causes random motion of the molecules in your skin (heat) by causing the molecules to transition to a higher-energy vibrational state.
Which one will feel warmer sooner depends on the circumstances. An infrared heater can be more efficient by transferring heat energy directly to your skin, which is where you want it to be, instead of wasting energy by warming air molecules that might not even ever wind up subsequently hitting your skin, for example if you're in a drafty garage. On the other hand, the electromagnetic radiation emitted by an infrared heater travels in a straight line, so you might not be directly heated by the electromagnetic radiation if you're in a part of the room where there isn't an uninterrupted straight line between the heating element and your skin.
If you're measuring heater effectiveness by measuring how long it takes to get the air in a room up to a certain temperature, a convective heater is likely to win, because heating air is what a convective heater does directly. An infrared heater heats whatever the radiation hits, which means you could for example be wasting energy by heating a wall or something directly, instead of nearly all of the energy going into heating air.