Nothing to write home about. Electric engines are efficient.
If you look at the efficiency from, say, coal burned in the power station to electricity in the batteries to driving, electric cars fare similar to internal combustion engines. (Burning your fuel in the big power station is more efficient than a car's internal combustion engine, but going through the extra steps of transmitting the energy to your home and then into the batteries eats some of that.)
This is rarely mentioned explicitly, but seems to be behind many of the "green car" claims: uranium "burned" in the power station is CO2-neutral, cheap and plentiful (even in politically stable regions.)
That's the ultimate advantage of electric cars: independence from any single energy source. Have sunshine? Use solar. Have water? Use hydro. Have uranium? Use fission.
And advances to generation technology increase the efficiency of everything downstream accordingly.
The disadvantage at this point is that our current capacitance technology is less energy dense and slower to replenish than a fossil fuel tank. What happens when your daily commute doesn't fit comfortably within the vehicle's range?
Energy technology should ultimately improve our versatility. Putting batteries in a car doesn't achieve that goal just yet.
For most Americans, todays batteries are more than sufficient to handle the daily commute. For outliers, they can choose to keep their ICEs or opt for hybrids like the Volt. To discount current tech for not being equivalent is just making excuses for the status quo. It's tantamount to simple FUD.
It most certainly is NOT fud. There are real consequences to your suggestion in the form of higher prices for both fuel and hardware. Right now we commute because it makes economic sense to commute, but if the fossil fuel cars and their fuel suddenly make that commute too costly it will negatively impact those who commite, their employers, and probably the communities in which these companies operate.
This all happens because there are a few folks who naively believe that batteries are a clean way to store energy.
How is pointing out that today's batteries are perfectly sufficient for the vast majority of commuters going to cause fossil fuels and the cars that drive them to become too costly?
You've gone from suggesting the batteries are insufficient to suggesting that correcting your misinformation and fear-mongering will itself raise the price of ICEs and their fuel.
You're burning down strawmen of your own imagining.
See Better Place's business model: buy the car, but rent the batteries, and have charging stations where they can be swapped in about as much time as filling your tank.
And by abstracting out of the car, you get to skip re-running acceleration/skid/crash tests, redesigning for the particular size/weight/balance signature of the new tech, retooling the lines to manipulate the thing, rewriting/testing the controller code to drive the damn thing, etc.
And perhaps most importantly: you avoid compromising a technology's best efficiency curve in the quest to meet the demands of the driving model.
e.g. even if you're burning fossil fuel to generate power, for whatever reason, there are vastly more-efficient ways to do it than the way we do in in-car ICEs. Those ways just happen to be ill-suited to the power-demands of personal vehicles.
Consider, too, that the diesel engines in large locomotives are basically rolling power plants. The diesel fuel doesn't directly power the drive train; it's used to generate electricity to power its electric motors.
One of the major reasons for these trucks and the locomotives having electric motors, is that maximum torque is available from 0 rpm in an electric motor. A diesel or petrol engine will max torque further up it's power band. This means these large machines are much easier to get moving.
And portability. And being reliable/known. Which is why militaries require large amounts of fossil fuels for now.
I remember when I was in the Army that our 5-ton dump trucks had lots of onboard stuff running off pressurized air, presumably making the vehicle more durable to electrical failures
Combine with local stored fossil fuels, and basic mobility/counter-mobility, and you have a harder-to-cripple ground force.
What we really need for electric cars is battery swapout. Just pull into the nearest station, trade out the drained battery for a fresh one, and you're off! Meanwhile, the station sets the drained battery on the charging array, and in a few hours, it's ready for the next customer!
In theory. I can see at least a couple of challenges in making such a system feasible. It's not like you can just shove the batteries into a massive underground tank, for example.
Not really. For those rare trips you drive more than 100 miles, rent a liquid-fueled vehicle. They're much better suited for such trips.
An electric vehicle is more specialized as a every-day commuter vehicle. It is cheaper in that duty.
Like a gas car, your cell phone can do anything your desktop can do, but your desktop is better suited for some tasks (i.e. faster for writing letters) even if its mobility is less.
swapout is DOA. 30kw/h = 1000A x 120V x 15min. With coffee and wi-fi 15 min is nothing for most of the people. Replacing pumps with electricity chargers, the gas stations will easily morph into Starbucks and Starbucks/Safeways/etc... will morph into charging stations.
What would the capital cost of such a scheme be and how fast could adoption happen? I am very skeptical of a large roll-out since all the current infrastructure is obsolete.
Yeah, we have a country built for a liquid fuel economy and electric just doesn't fit. I have some serious fears of technology not as versatile as previous and not as cheap.
Not to mention that in an accident, the available energy with liquid fuel is a fraction of the total. Only the gaseous portion will expode. With a battery, the entire stored energy is available should it arc.
it'll be interesting to see if with this renewed nuclear scare if we'll see centralized power generation as such a benefit. as small scale energy production gets more cost effective I could see many homes generating their own power (solar, thermal) - though I'm not saying any time soon.
If you look at the efficiency from, say, coal burned in the power station to electricity in the batteries to driving, electric cars fare similar to internal combustion engines. (Burning your fuel in the big power station is more efficient than a car's internal combustion engine, but going through the extra steps of transmitting the energy to your home and then into the batteries eats some of that.)