Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're looking at this the wrong way. Let me make an analogy to a different market - hobby r/c aircraft. 10 Years ago, the only practical way to get certain sizes of aircraft was to use gas powered engines. Nowadays most people use brushless motors for everything, not because they think "hey these are better for the environment" or "these are more efficient", but because they are much more convenient and much…
Generating power at a central power plant (which can happen to be solar/wind/other renewable method rather than coal) and using that energy to power cars is much more efficient than having thousands of miniature power plants burning gasoline/diesel carrying people around town. Here's the thing: this is bullshit. Did you know that only about a third of the electricity produced at an electrical plant ends up making it…
Re: "It's A Brick" - Tesla Motors' Devastating Design Problem
#281Well, electricity is certainly cheaper to charge a car battery than it is to buy gasoline to travel the same amount, and cheaper price for a commodity generally implies uses less energy. Does your gallon of gas take in to account the cost of driving it around the country instead of being transmitted over power lines? A quick google search found that there's only a 6-8% loss in power in transmitting the energy across the power grid, but only 30-40% of the energy contained in coal can be turned into electricity. That is more telling of coal power plants than the general principle of charging cars off the grid.