What were Tesla thinking?

Southwest ontario - Waterloo - $0.979 per liter for regular at both stations within a km. Range in town 0.929 to 1.009 per liter right now.

They're free to charge at public points in the UK, and dirt cheap if you charge at home. But the extra cost to buy the car is the same as the amount you save on fuel, so no point.

One of my big beefs is government mandating science and technology. I think I here that no new internal combustion engine cars can be sold in the UK after 2030. California is mandating it in 2030. Other states will follow.

Sure electric vehicles do not pollute but their pollution from the extra materials used and electric generation is hidden and overall probably worse.

There has been a couple of articles about that. Many think it is just moving the pollution, plus the battery problem.

If you can generate electricity with other than fossil fuels you remove a lot of pollution from operation. You still have batteries to be recycled, mining operations for the materials and such.

The IC engine is only about 25% to 30% efficient so even generating with say, 85% efficient fuel use may help overall.

I imagine it will be better in the future. Right now, the cost of an EV is still high and difficult to justify economically, can be a PITA on a long trip as you have to take a while to charge.

Apart from fuel cells which can be higher than ICEs, what fuel did you have in mind to have 85% efficiency?

The proof to me would be when electric vehicles are cheaper than the equivalent vehicles with internal combustion engines.

Nuclear might be the way to go but I cannot see much expansion. The Japan incident was apparently worse than Chernobyl but went out to sea.

Wind and solar are just pushing the pollution elsewhere.

Efficiency in internal combustion appears to have reached its limit for now but should be possible.

Funny thing I just heard was that a here brewery was having trouble finding a supply of carbon dioxide. Might be anticipation of all the dry ice needed for vaccine refrigeration. This, when we are wallowing in carbon dioxide pollution ;) What will be the environmental impact when all gas stations are replaced with charging stations?

By the time you can afford an electric car, you'll have one of these in the back yard.

Not so much the fuel but what burns it to power the generator. Some boilers can be that efficient. Electricity has relatively little loss getting to the end user. If you use oil to run a boiler at 85%, lose a little in transmission, the car may be operating at 80% of the energy instead of 25%.

Lets stop there. Are we talking of boilers or fuel used in association with prime movers? They are world apart.

I can also assure you some boilers are far higher than that.

What has a boiler got to do with this?

I really suggest you lookup Carnot and the Second Law of Thermodynamics before mentioning boiler and transmission in the same sentence. This might assist in a more complete understanding of thermal engines:

No s*it, this is just a crude comparison for conversation, not a comparison of boiler types.

Boilers make steam that turns generators to make electricity.

Not interested in the fine details. The numbers are just to show that electricity has the potential to be more efficient. If you want to do a full analysis, be my guest, I'll at least look at it.

Since we are looking at transmission efficiency be sure to look at the losses in gasoline too. It may be roughly 25% in an ICE but still has to be transported using fossil fuel in ships, tankers, and pumping so for every BTU of energy extracted from the earth there are losses along the way to refine and move it to the point of use.

It's going from heat to motion that is inefficient.

It's not a matter of fine details. Any heat engine - a device for converting heat into motion - has a maximum efficiency given by:

where where Tc and Th are the absolute temperatures of the cold and hot reservoirs, respectively, or

(Th -Tc) / Th

- which amounts to the same thing; so you want the biggest possible difference in temperatures between the input and output. This is why an ICE is more efficient than a simple steam engine as the temperatures are so much more.

Once you've got motion you can convert it into electricity very efficiently.

Heat is a "low grade" energy because it consists of the random motion of molecules; mechanical (and electrical) energy is "high grade" because it is directed.

TANSTAAFL

And that's about what it would look like too... I get enough exercise shoveling the driveway without shoveling out the solar farm.