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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 more powerful. That is what Tesla is going after - more powerful. Their target market is people that have tiny sports cars and saying "electric motors have an insane amount of torque at low rpms", and then as this other thing, way over there - by the way, they don't use as much fuel too. There is a whole another ideology that the "green" movement is, which is saying we need to get people to drive less, and when they drive, they should use the most fuel efficient car they should, because you know, the environment and stuff. 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. However, most people don't care about the environment the way that people that want to push everyone to drive electric vehicles. I certainly don't. A year or two ago, I wanted to get a new car, from my 1998 ford mustang. I had two desires, one was to get a more powerful car. The other was to spend less money on gas. My friend had bought a Prius recently and I liked the features of it, so I went to the Toyota dealership and took one for a test drive. When I finally got to do it (I would not recommend the Rosevilla Toyota to anyone, for the record), the power was completely unacceptable to me and there was no way I was buying that car. I ended up buying a Mini Cooper S, which was more powerful, and had better gas mileage. I think that is the goal of Tesla, to get cars which are more powerful than the gasoline cars, and cheaper to operate. Do you really think that the customer needs to adapt to the car, rather than the car adapting to the person? Isn't that like the opposite of everything Hacker News stands for? |
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 to our wall sockets? (And that's not even calculating the efficiency of the appliances that use that electricity!) Compare that to an internal combustion engine (~1/4 of the energy getting converted into a mechanical form) and we're not really looking at much of an efficiency gain.
Proponents of electrical vehicles have simply not done the math.