| >No, you can use a standard clothes dryer hookup and charge overnight. These are also high power, special circuits. The outlet your TV is plugged into isn't near that power level. Most appliances run off 110v. >With increased density comes either longer range or lighter vehicles. The lighter the vehicle, the more efficient it becomes. Yeah, that's certainly an inefficiency. Not as big of an issue to its power source inefficiency. Heavy EVs aren't it's main flaw. >So you do understand why denser battery packs are useful then? Also, ICE is not a "rotational energy" and more or less than "EV" is. I don't understand why this is included. I should have said "it uses an extreme dense form of energy". You can make bigger springs on a wind up car, but you need a better source of energy to wind it up. Gas goes from, "fuel -> combustion -> rotational energy". There's too many steps to go from "coal -> rotational energy" to even list. All of which, have losses. >We didn't make the spring bigger. We made it smaller and lighter and got the same output. That is more efficient. Sure, but doesn't fix the real issue of production and transportation. The weight is a lesser issue. >Yes, we no longer have to improve efficiency in the motor itself. It's already many times more efficient than an ICE. In a small scope, yes. In the whole picture, no. There's no more efficiency gain on the EV. That's it. It's at it's max efficiency and the only way to improve its efficiency is to redesign the entire system and create new technology to produce and transport electricity. Mean while, ICE is still getting improvements such as the Freevalve [0]. Not to mention how much more efficient diesel is compared to gas. >And yet, after all those transformations and power losses, an EV is still a net gain in efficiency in most cases. An ICE sends about 20% of the energy to the wheels. An EV triples that in the worst case. This means the infrastructure that you get your energy from can lose a lot along the way and you still end up net positive. And it concentrates further efficiency improvements. That abstraction is huge. Depends on your source. If you have wind powering your EV from a turbine, you generally don't care about the losses as much since it's all "free" anyways. Your EV is still wind powered though, it's no different than compacting that wind and using it to blow you down the street. It would take A LOT of wind to do that, so does generating electricity out of it. If your source of power is coal, you start at 66% loss, then 8-15% for powerlines, then you got charger losses, DC-AC losses, drive train losses. It's not as efficient as you think. You cannot create more power than you put in, no matter how much you try. Don't forget how much more efficient diesel is as well. [0]https://www.freevalve.com/ |
I'm focused here on tons of CO₂ per mile driven. After a century of eeking out improvements in ICE efficiency, it's still far below what we're doing with EVs. Unless you think the Freevalve is going to literally double efficiency, it's not a replacement for electric cars.
Only in the most extreme places in the US (West Virginia, Wyoming, Missouri) does the EV advantage start to wane. And even in those places, it still beats gasoline!
Burning coal for the electricity gets you 66%. Line losses and charging losses can cut that in half, and you're still beating the gasoline by a huge margin. Especially if you also ignore the costs of extracting, refining, and transporting all that fuel.