I know it’s a bit early in the day for a quote of the day, but I have to go test drive a XXXXXX for the TTAC Ten Worst Awards. Hopefully, Eddy will wake up from his birthday celebrations soon, equipped with enough functional brain cells to continue to feed the beast (that’s you) with fresh autoinfotainment. So before I leave my garret to drive a POS on your behalf, I’d like to leave you with this thought: “the Tesla is really just another example of why gasoline is still king.” These words of wisdom come to us via Ralph Kinney Bennett, who pens paen to petrol for The American. “A gallon of gas weighs about 6.3 pounds and produces roughly 35 kilowatt hours of energy. That’s enough to burn a 100-watt light bulb continuously for more than two weeks. A lead-acid battery could do the same thing without needing a recharge—if it were the size of a desk and weighed a ton. Energy density is the point. We just haven’t come up with a fuel or a device that will safely and economically offer the same calorific value in such a small space as an automobile’s gasoline tank.” OK, lithium ion batteries. OK, range. Specifically, a 911 vs. a Tesla Roadster…
“But, while the Tesla’s batteries are electronically panting and cooling off and its dash displays are flashing warnings about decreased range and automatically restricting the electric motor’s torque, the Porsche will go merrily on its way and cruise up to 400 miles on the remaining gasoline in its 17.7 gallon tank. And while the Tesla is recharging its batteries over a period of hours, the Porsche can have its tank refilled in a minute or two and be on its way.”
Graph and article about energy density from Wikipedia
Well, he has a point. Nobody ever said gasoline wasn’t fantastic energy storage/transport device. It just makes nasty stuff when you burn it.
If there were an easy answer, people wouldn’t have spent billions over decades trying to find it. Doesn’t mean we stop trying and just keep burning gas.
There’s no more “efficient” way of disposing with human waste than just crapping in your local pond or stream – doesn’t mean we can all just keep doing that, either!
The off-handed dismissal of electric powered vehicles due to things like range, charging time, or electrical source is just narrow-minded. Obviously there’s problems with alternative energy vehicles. There’s been problems with gas powered vehicles for the last 50 years or so too. Some of these electic vehicle problems can be overcome with technology, some of them by simply adapting our lives, some of them will never be overcome. But it’s a bit early in the game to pretend we know everything and simply dismiss ideas that have shown quite a bit of potential.
Technically, he is correct. But he fails to consider that gasoline doesn’t exist in vacuum. It doesn’t just magically appear in your tank then disappear when consumed.
It is the externalities of burning gasoline for transportation that are causing the country and planet so much harm.
And it is these externalities that alternative energy cars like Telsa are designed to address, as much as they able.
The externalities of electricity are pretty bad too.
“externalities” is a good description. Except for sunlight, wind, or human power, there is no energy source that is available at the point of consumption – in or around a moving vehicle. Given that sailing or pedaling cars is not feasible, then all the sources under consideration need to be in some way extracted/harvested/collected, refined/produced/optimized, transported, distributed and stored. All of those actions require the input of energy in some form.
Pragmatically, for better or worse an infrastructure to do all that for liquid fuels was created and is in place. The infrastructure for doing all that with electricity is in place, too. That makes those two the most sensible options for near term vehicle fueling. Biofuels and renewable sources of electricity are working to replace the supply end of those systems with better sources. A lot of work is being done on the vehicle end to make more practical and efficient use of those sources.
There just isn’t any other realistic alternative.
All sources of energy have externalities. If you discount global warming as a concern, which I do, then gasoline looks very good, even good for the environment. It’s still relatively cheap and plentiful, it is a great wealth-creator (which is very green!), and it can be extracted with little damage to the environment. To me, the only legitimate concern about gasoline is global warming, but I don’t think we will find, after all the Gore-green-media led hysteria is behind us, that man-made global warming (i) exists; and/or (ii) is anything we can do anything about without ruining with world economies.
“But he fails to consider that gasoline doesn’t exist in vacuum. It doesn’t just magically appear in your tank then disappear when consumed.”
I agree with you and would add that there is also an environmental cost to the production of gasoline itself. Don’t forget the costs, environmental and economic, associated with drilling, distillation and transportation. Electric cars today are where the PC was in the 1970s. They existed, and were commercially available, but impractical for the everyman. I think it is reasonable to look for similar technical advancements in automobile propulsion systems.
Interesting. According to here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline_gallon_equivalent
It takes 0.88 gallon of diesel to do what the 1 gallon of gasoline will do.
This is worth a read when considering Hydrogen too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EROEI
Considering that about 50% of the electricity produced in the US comes from coal, and another 20% from natural gas, you could argue that if you’re charging and driving your Tesla in the US, it’s nearly 3/4 a fossil-fuel vehicle.
Gas didn’t become so widely used because J D Rockefeller was a ruthless businessman. As the article clearly states, gas has a high energy density. It is very hard to find a material at normal atmospheric pressure and temperature that is more energy dense. It takes a lot of energy to move and operate a normal auto. Electric cars will get into wider use by getting better batteries (for storing the energy) and getting lighter (to use less energy). No one has demonstrated a way to recharge electric batteries in similar amounts of time to refill your gas tank. The amount of current flow would be huge to approach gas refuel times. Electricity generation is not pollution-free activity.
Except for sunlight, wind, or human power, there is no energy source that is available at the point of consumption – in or around a moving vehicle
Well, there’s fission and fusion. Minor technical problems, though…
I still think that a $20k electric car that can go 80-100 miles on a charge would work for most people. I would purchase one from a major OEM as my daily driver.
Overall I believe that the externalities on electricity are better than oil derived fuel.
The supply chain for electricity is much shorter and less subject to disruption than oil.
When you look at the security and balance of payments implications I would much rather get my transportation energy from a dirty coal power plant than as oil from the Saudis, Hugh Chavez, et al.
It takes 0.88 gallon of diesel to do what the 1 gallon of gasoline will do.
Be aware the diesel is physically more dense than gasoline; comparisons using weight instead of volume yield a less favourable ratio.
The problem with wind-supplied electricity is that nobody wants a big electric wind mill in their backyard, just as nobody wants a house next to power lines, just as nobody wants to go to the beach and see oil rigs on the horizon.
On the other hand, since most of our driving is short-range, an electric car maybe an option for a lot of people.
And for the long trips, you’ll still want good old liquid fossil fuel.
A bit off topic but the environmentalists concerns are very selective.
I live in coastal California and an issue in our area is available water. Water is collected in reservoirs from the adjacent mountains where there is 50 inches of rainfall each year. No new reservoirs have been built over the past 50 years due to environmental concerns. The population has continued to expand.
Now the proposed solution for developing water shortages is to build desalinization plants along the ocean. These plants are expensive, inefficient and energy hungry. A combination of environmental groups and companies that manufacture the hardware are pushing hard for these plants.
The modest proposal I make to my green friends is to use the open ocean which is heated by the sun for desalination. Let it collect into clouds which then move inland and drop the fresh water into the mountains. All we have to do is collect it in the mountain valleys (reservoirs) and use it as needed. If they really wanted to go all out they could even add a hydroelectric generator at the outlet of the reservoir to get electricity for their electric cars.
My proposal is greeted with less than enthusiasm.
In a few years when they are cold, hungry and walking in the rain maybe their attitudes will change.
Actually Rod Panhard, when I vacation at Gulf Shores, AL and look out at all the oil & gas rigs off the beach, I get a good vibe. Maybe I’m just an aberration…..
The problem with the notion of a “city car” for commuting is that while it would work OK for that purpose (though one can imagine the stalled vehicles by the side of the road because someone “forgot” to plug the car in) it would require almost everybody to keep a second, presumably fossil-fueled vehicle at home for longer trips.
I don’t know of anybody who doesn’t take at least some long trips, and I do quite frequently.
Honestly, batteries are terribly inefficient means of storing energy. Seems to me something like a hydrogen fuel cell or a IC-electric hybrid (where the only purpose of the IC motor is the charge the batteries for the electric motor) is the only practical way to actually replace IC vehicles as opposed to just augmenting them.
Considering that about 50% of the electricity produced in the US comes from coal, and another 20% from natural gas, you could argue that if you’re charging and driving your Tesla in the US, it’s nearly 3/4 a fossil-fuel vehicle.
Don’t forget, however, that burning fossil fuel at a power plant in order to power an electric vehicle is still far more efficient than burning fossil fuel locally in the car’s internal combustion engine. Many studies have been conducted (e.g. http://www.jhfc.jp/data/seminor/fy2005/pdf/06_h17seminar_e.pdf). Trying to establish an apples-to-apples measure for EV efficiency is tricky, but the answer is still in 100-300 MPG range.
volvo:
Given the two alternatives, I think your plan makes sense. The problem is marketing. Call it a “Solar Thermal Evaporative Geo-Asynchronous Desalinization Plant” and you’ll get lots of support!
Martin Albright:
Agree. Too many act like the idea being proposed is an instantaneous transition to tiny, 40 mile electric cars, with every other vehicle disappearing overnight. In truth, there will be decades with a variety of electric, hybrid, and gas vehicles on the road. People will pick the one(s) that make most sense for them. I don’t own a F350 dually because I don’t need to haul anything. If I did, I still probably wouldn’t drive it to work, just like I wouldn’t tow a boat with the Cobra replica I’d like to own some day. Right now I have one basic 4-door sedan that is a good compromise for everything I do. As you suggest, a hybrid will probably be the best compromise, drivetrain-wise, for people with the requirements you outline.
The whole point of having a car is the freedom to travel it provides. If you’re just going to use an electric car as a city car, then you might as well be taking light rail public transportation or something. Unless you want to build a network of cantenary wires along the freeway and add retractable pantographs to electric cars, you gotta find a long-term solution.
In a monetary society this debate between gasoline and electricity will always be present. This however can’t rule out the possibility of human kind changing its methods(in some areas) based on enviromental awareness. Research is underway to find more powerful sources from which to derive electricity. The answers may be revealed if testing this spring at the National Ignition Facility along with other similar facilities around the world are successful. I do agree that for the time being the electric car is somewhat of a novelty, but definitely worth exploring for profit nonetheless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility
https://lasers.llnl.gov/
“Fusion is the Future…and it always will be.”
AG: Who’s taking away freedom? With a plug-in hybrid, you use electricity for short trips, gas for long ones. You plug in when you are home, buy gas when you are away from home.
Interesting article. My own prediction is that because of the energy density of gasoline, we will see that series hybrids with a gasoline (or diesel) generator and an all-electric drivetrain power us into the future.
With current technology, we can squeeze out 50% of the energy in a gallon of diesel as electricity. That’s almost 20 kilowatt hours. Put that in an electric motor in a Tesla Roadster (which gets about 5 miles per kilowatt hour) and you get 100 miles per gallon. Not bad. A Lotus Elise gets 25 miles per gallon.
Pesky things like the laws of thermodynamics keep us from getting too much energy from gasoline. Homer Simpson scolds his daughter Lisa when she invents a perpetual motion machine, “Lisa, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.” Unfortunately, we all do, Homer. The Carnot cycle gives us the upper bound of the energy we can get from gasoline.
Still, harnessing the energy density of gasoline to power an efficient electric motor will prove, I think, an ideal combination. You get extra benefits from electric power too. When you can get energy back from braking, you improve energy efficiency a lot.
Right now we pay a big penalty for acceleration (we never get any of that energy back) and for climbing hills (none of that energy either). The laws of physics let us recover that kinetic energy (from acceleration) and potential energy (from climbing hills). That may make up for the penalty we pay to satisfy Carnot — a penalty that must be paid.
If you get a lot of energy from regenerative braking, weight does not really matter. Aerodynamic drag and rolling resistance begin to dominate as the energy sappers. We can work on both those. Cars may start to look like airplanes. (The Aptera does.) We may get rid of tires and move to rails instead of roads. Interesting to speculate what might happen.
With all of this, the range from a gallon of gasoline may be a lot more than we think possible today. The Society of Automotive Engineers sponsors a Supermileage competition. The winners are getting thousands of miles per gallon for their quirky “cars” (really recumbent quadricycles) that use a 1 and 1/2 horsepower engine to go from 10 to 20 miles per hour around a flat racetrack.
Will we see a regular car get that kind of mileage? In 20 years, I would not be surprised at all to see a car that get 1,000 miles a gallon. Gasoline may power us into the electric future.
Volvo, that is quite a bit less than the whole truth about water. The increasing population doesn’t make much difference because the great majority of the water in California is used in agriculture. Agriculture gets special low rates, so they have little incentive to use less, or even to grow drought-tolerant crops. Yes, they grow rice in the desert, and other insanities. As good cropland is converted into tract housing, it’s probably reducing total water usage, rather than increasing it.
All the good dam sites in California have been used. As increasing population does put pressure on the water supply, cutting the agricultural subsidy would be a lot better way to deal with it than new dams in marginal locations or desalinization.
The battery powered electric car is a long way from a new idea. My great-grandmother drove one before World War One.
The fundamental problem remains the batteries. In most cases it takes about two generations for a technology to reach a plateau. The airplane was invented in 1903. The 747 flew in 1968. The transistor and the computer were invented about 60 years ago. Batteries are an even older technology. They were the first form of electric current generation dating back more than 200 years. The biggest problem with improving batteries is that there is only so much chemistry. We can surmise that every plausible combination of compounds has been tried and that the ones we have are pretty much it.
Another fundamental issue is charging times. They are constrained by the relationship Watts = Volts * Amps. Even a recharge through a 240 V 30 A line (electric ovens and dryers) is only four times faster (7.2 kWh/hr) than a standard 120 V 15 A line (1.8 kWh/hr).
GM claims the Volt will be able to go 60 mi. on 12 kWh*. Recarging it will take almost 7 hrs on a regular line and almost 2 hours on a 240*30 line. Anything that would make recharge on the fly tolerable would require insulated gloves and shoes and safety eye wear. Further, a vehicle that carries 72 kWh (300 mi range) would take 6 times as long to fill-up. No problem, just use it every other day.
*Just because GM says it does not make it so. I am skeptical. This report from the Department of Energy: “Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Testing” by James E. Francfort and Lee A. Slezak. [PDF] seems to indicate that the GM claim is about twice as good as the best they saw.
Of course the real question is why. We can manufacture liquid motor vehicle fuels out of anything with carbon in it such as coal or garbage. So, theories about petroleum imports or limits on petroleum supplies are not a reason to spend money on bevs. Global warming is a possible issue, but the easier solution is to replace coal and gas burning power plants with solar or wind or (“gaia forbid”) nuclear.
Please do not call for a “Manhattan Project” to make better batteries. In 1942 when the Manhattan Project began, the phenomenon of nuclear fission had been known for less than 10 years. At the time, Henri Becquerel’s 1896 discovery of radioactivity was less than 50 years in the past. A lot of brand new physics had been developed in the first 30 years of century XX. There was enormous intellectual headroom for important technological advances. And who knows? perhaps one day we will use those advances instead of regarding them as bad ju-ju.
The Manhattan Project was able to exploit the discovery of previously unknown fundamental forces of the universe. Batteries are in a very different position. They were a century and a half old when the the first nuclear reactor was started, and are now two hundred years old. There are no new physical forces lurking out there to make batteries more useful.
And please keep the Apollo project analogies to yourself as well. You can see the moon from here, the Saturn V was just a scaled up V2. It was a neat hack, but kind of a technological dead end, unless you like Tang. You cannot see a battery that is less than 30″ * 12″ * 12″, weighs less than 300 lbs, and holds 72 kWh. And I don’t think you will.
I am getting sick of the argument that comes up every time EVs are mentioned. The bottom line is that a purely plug-in electric car won’t be the most convenient solution for everyone. Heck, in some parts of the country a 100 mile round-trip range won’t even get you to the grocery store. But that’s no reason to toss out the idea.
I believe a plug-in car will meet the needs of a lot of people:
– those with regular commutes below 50 miles round-trip
– those with a second car in the family, e.g. two drivers which probably describes 70% of U.S. households. Use one car for the 80%+ of the time when you are commuting or running around town and the other for trips to Disneyland. It blows my mind when I drive around suburbs and homes with not one but two full-sized SUVs parked in the driveway.
There will always be exceptions and special needs. For example, I can’t for the life of me figure out what I would do with an F350 that I can’t already do with my Mazda5 but I don’t own a boat or a trailer, I don’t regularly carry building materials, and it’s rare for me to drive more than 100 miles in a week. There are some who do and that’s why there are so many different kinds of vehicles available to consumers.
Also, while electricity is most often produced using fossil fuels it’s much easier to control the emissions of a stationary power plant than hundreds of thousands of aging cars. And there ARE alternatives. As one example, there’s a quickly growing interest in residential solar (distributed energy production just feet away from your EV charger), and in some parts of the country (like Calfornia) many new homes are being built with solar panels pre-installed.
And lets not forget the national security issues involved in petroleum. Coal and natural gas may not be the squeaky clean but they are available closer to home while we develop alternatives.
Batteries are in a very different position. They were a century and a half old when the the first nuclear reactor was started, and are now two hundred years old. There are no new physical forces lurking out there to make batteries more useful.
But what changes is the technology used to manufacture them. This month’s Discover magazine has a short article on MIT using viruses to grow electrodes with very high surface area which can hold much more charge per unit volume. There’s another article on superinsulators which could eventually prevent charge leakage in batteries, so making them more efficient. There’s no new physics here, just technology.
Lead acid cells were a non starter, as they entail too much weight on vehicle that primarily relies on battery power. To get the weight down Lithium polymer cells are the way to go, but they are expensive.
The lightest electric-hybrid vehicle vehicle I know weighs a mere 45 lbs.
Short range urban vehicle.
At least you won’t be stranded when if the battery runs down.
Re Batteries, nobody ever thought you’d fit 4 billion transistors on the head of a pin either, but somehow we keep fitting more.
The fact is we will continue to optimize what we’ve got until something better comes along. So batteries will get better, lighter, etc even if there is no physics-defying breakthrough.
Likewise, we’ll add more and more “bio”fuel to the liquid supply side, and more renewable sources to the grid supply side, until someone invents the “Mr Fusion” and we have infinite free energy forever.
Firefly (A spinoff of Caterpillar) claims that their tech can produce lead acid batteries with at least double the energy density of current ones, the ability to do a lot more deep discharge cycles, and better power in cold weather. Supposedly that will get them close to the power density of more advanced battery types at about one-fifth the cost. The first generation of the tech (with a 15-20% energy density increase) is supposed to be out in early 2009. I haven’t seen a projected time-line for the second generation.
Firefly is kind of a wild card. If they can do what they claim it will make a lot of things possible. Relatively low cost and ability to use much of the existing production infrastructure for lead acid batteries would be a major plus if they can get close to the energy density of even NIMH batteries. If they can get close to Lithium Ion territory that would be even better.
It’s not just weight that makes electric cars less practical. It’s also the cost of the current battery packs.
Obviously it’s wise to be skeptical until the tech is actually available, but Firefly is something to keep an eye on.
Every day I drive 5 miles from my house to the train station and back in my Audi A4. In sub-freezing temperatures, I usually have heat just as I am pulling into my garage. On this short trip, I typically average 18mpg in the summer, and <15mpg in winter with the 1.8L 4 cyl. Yesterday, I don’t think I got out of 3rd gear, and I averaged 12mpg. An electric car would be perfect for me. No efficiency penalty in cold temperatures, and instant-on resistance heat. Sure the heat would destroy my range, but my house is only 2.5 miles away, so I could afford it. A slow recharge rate would not bother me at all. I’m looking forward to seeing the BEV effort from Nissan. I would not even consider a Nissan other than that.
chris724
I have the same commute, and would buy a plug-in EV tomorrow if someone would sell me one.
BTW, in better weather a bike is the perfect tool for that commute. But without secure bike parking I’d need a folding bike, and the cool one I want is $1200. Ouch.
Sorry about going way OT!
kkt said
The increasing population doesn’t make much difference because the great majority of the water in California is used in agriculture. Agriculture gets special low rates, so they have little incentive to use less, or even to grow drought-tolerant crops.
True
As good cropland is converted into tract housing, it’s probably reducing total water usage, rather than increasing it.
True
All the good dam sites in California have been used.
False
As increasing population does put pressure on the water supply, cutting the agricultural subsidy would be a lot better way to deal with it than new dams in marginal locations or desalinization.
I don’t fully agree with that but if we did increase the price of water used by agriculture it would be a first step towards implementing the hungry part of cold, hungry and walking I referred to.
As it turns out where I live there are good reservoir sites which have been blocked from development for about 50 years. The reason for stopping development of further water resources was to limit population growth in the area. It did not work.
“nobody ever thought you’d fit 4 billion transistors on the head of a pin either, but somehow we keep fitting more. … So batteries will get better, lighter, etc even if there is no physics-defying breakthrough.”
“But what changes is the technology used to manufacture them.”
Sorry, no hats, no rabbits. The constraint of chemistry is fundamental. Remember that a battery carries both halves of the reaction. An ICE can pull the oxidizer from the air. Battery chemistries are more finely balanced than that.
The problem with the notion of a “city car” for commuting is that while it would work OK for that purpose (though one can imagine the stalled vehicles by the side of the road because someone “forgot” to plug the car in) it would require almost everybody to keep a second, presumably fossil-fueled vehicle at home for longer trips.
Too bad someone could not come with a business based on exchanging money for temporary use of a vehicle that the average person does not need very often.
Too bad someone could not come with a business based on exchanging money for temporary use of a vehicle that the average person does not need very often.
Meh. There have been car sharing and bike sharing programs around for years and most of them are only marginally successful and then only within a very limited population group. It’s one of those notions that looks good on paper but is ignorant of the realities of human behavior.
For example, at least a half dozen times a year I take my 4×4 truck on a 4 wheeling/camping trip in the mountains or desert. In terms of strict efficiency, it would make more sense for me to keep a small commuter car at home and rent a vehicle when I want to go off road.
However, that ignores the fact that my truck is set up exactly the way I want it for the purposes for which I use it. It would be impossible to rent a vehicle that is equipped like mine (and if it were possible it would probably not be financially viable for the rental company to keep such a vehicle in its inventory.)
Similarly, it’s not unusual for me to use the truck on weekends to pick up large furniture items or building supplies if I’m working on something around the house. Again, the strict economic analysis might suggest it would make sense for me to rent a truck in order to do this, but what about the time and effort and energy it takes to get the rental? All of those transactional costs add up and by the time you tot up all the numbers, I would probably save very little, if any (and even that is assuming that my time is worth nothing – which, when you are talking about my off-work time, it most definitely is worth something to me.)
All vehicle choices are a compromise of some type. Pure “efficiency” never has been and never will be the sole determination of which vehicle a person chooses.
Transport is really difficult when the oil runs out or becomes more difficult, or indeed you believe your trip to the shops means one less igloo for Polar Bears. Most of our technology is plug-in – i.e. we just need to make sure power comes out of the plug. Everything else, including water supply etc., depends on it.
For transportation though the key issue is convenience vs waste.
I can drive until the land runs out (further with ferries) in my current car because I can refuel whenever I need. People drive from London to Peking regularly in cars dating from 1920, so it’s kind of a standard thing.
I stop, fill it, and continue with the same range and performance. My car is reasonably efficient but no internal combustion car is “very good”.
Leccy tech (batteries) at the moment requires a recharge time – somewhere between 2 and 24 hours as I understand it. Ok so you can regenerate on braking, but then again my normal car slows on when I lift off, and it cuts of the fuel too.
But each time the battery car stops I have to wait for it to be useful again. For commuting this is not an issue, but I don’t just commute – sometimes I go to work and may be expected to undertake a 400 mile round trip at short notice. Which is why public transport is no use. And the battery car becomes impractical.
Hydrogen offers a mid-ground. I can refuel when I need but there are energy losses between the generation of the power and me using it. The generation can be “green” or “nuclear” or it can mean less homes for polar bears/penguins, but the loss remains – there is less energy out of Hydrogen than takes to make it. Make the energy out of renewables and that becomes a better balance.
Biofuel – where is my food ? And is the EROEI really all that good when you take into account mechanised food production and fertilizers ? I have read studies which say yes, and others which say no. Otherwise its just petrol/diesel all over again – i.e. convenient.
So where is the answer ? Maybe if we could get to a point of real green energy production then Hydrogen becomes the answer. I wonder though, what the sudden increase in Hydrogen “extraction” subsequent burning/reintroduction to the atmosphere will be blamed/responsible for. In essence nothing we do will be an answer for the “green lobby” we now have. Only a return to living from the land in small communities without the facilities we have now (and that includes education, medicine and other “nice to haves”) will make them happy.
I can see a future where the things we petrol-heads deem important become less so. Performance – well 100 mph may become supercar territory – get used to 75 as good. 0-60 ? Well why not go for a decent 13 seconds – remember everyone else will be at the same level so trying to beat that V8 truck/repmobile at your side is unlikely to be a priority. Then of course people will offer to “hop up” your green-mobile.
But we will accept this as being the “norm” – maybe.
Yeah, as was alluded to above… Energy density is not the whole point. Energy efficiency is at least as important. Consider that capacity of Tesla Roadster battery pack is about 55 kWh. That the energy equivalent to only about 1.5 gallons of gasoline. Yet John Carmack (not an environmentalist) says he gets a range of 150 miles per charge with aggressive daily driving.
http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home/News?news_id=364
(scroll to the last section near the bottom of the page)
How far could you drive with only 1.5 gallons of gas in your tank?
How far could you drive with only 1.5 gallons of gas in your tank?
Far enough to get to the filling station, after that I would have ~20 gallons to use as I wish.