[missosoup]

RTGs don't provide enough energy to power a car. You're looking at 1kW electrical maximum. The one on mars lander Cruiosity provides about 100W electrical power nominal.

But the main reason is that people are stupid and some would inevitably pull theirs apart and contaminate their surroundings with pretty nasty radioactive material. There's no engineering or practical reason why we wouldn't have RTGs for a heap of civilian applications, the reason is that people suck.

NASA is currently working on a 'micro' scale fully self contained fission reactor for the next mission to meet the higher power demand of the craft.

[ju-st]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

[dheera]

That's only about a factor of 10 from being useful. If you have a 10kW battery, or 10 1kW batteries, you can use that to charge a Lithium battery for a day which will get you 100 kW for 2.4 hours per day, which sounds pretty damn useful for typical urban commuter use.

[nicoburns]

I think it'd be much cheaper to use PV for this use case.