There's plenty of ugly gas burners out there, too. Automotive makers keep trying to evolve their products with futurism, no matter how ****ty it sometimes looks.
I wonder how efficiencies compare.
Energy provided by petroleum fuels vs energy needed to drill/extract, move it to the refinery for processing, move it all over the bloody place until it gets distributed to gas stations. Gas engines are said to be ~15% efficient (ie, ~85% of the energy within the fuel is wasted as heat). Total pollution costs?
From what I've read (I'm no expert on chemistry or gasoline combustion), nearly 69% of the gasoline, by weight, is converted into pollution (the rest being mostly harmless emissions and water). So 1 US gallon of gas, weighing 6.25 pounds, spews over 4 pounds of crap into the air. (Yeah, it mostly goes into the air, it doesn't just disappear.)
Electrical engines provide less power. But the power itself is mostly generated by oil-/gas-/coal-burning and nuclear plants. A small percentage is "renewable" solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc. I suppose the big plants have greater efficiencies compared to car-sized engines, still their pollution must be comparable (if not a bit greater, due to inefficiencies and losses transferring this energy into the car). Yeah, they can reuse roughly 10-20% of the power "lost" to braking/etc, but they still don't really compare well. And what will we do with all those dead batteries?
It seems to me that electric vehicles give diminished performance (at higher prices), consume the same quantities of resources (though slightly different ones), and simply move the pollution problem somewhere else. Somewhere far away from the traffic-dense cities. I'm not buying it.
