Electric Cars are not ready to replace gas-powered cars.
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Believe it or not this is the real solution. You make the generator where it is as efficient as possible and much smaller so its less weight. If you KNOW you are going very far then you have a switch that just turns it on and lets it run instead of an automatic mode that only runs when the battery is low.
I know you're making a joke but their is a balance there that would make electric cars useful, and practical.
This is stupid. Instead of taking fuel and turning it directly into motion for the vehicle, you would have them turn fuel into motion, motion into electricity, electricity into battery and battery back into motion. The only thing it beats is having to make the energy somewhere else and ship it miles thru power lines to get to your car
Maybe in an attempt not to over explain I wasn't clear enough. I'm talking about an electric car that has a SMALL motor(less than 50 hp maybe even only 10-20 hp) that can trickle charge the batteries or just add to the power being used.
There is a lot of inefficiency in cars because they need a wide power band to deal with various problems like hills and starting from a dead stop. If you have a generator that runs at the most efficient RPMs with no clutch etc it solves a lot of problems and removes a lot of weight. Its not just as simple as motion to electricity to motion. Although I admit that part of it is less than ideal.
What I'm saying is if the goal is an electric car... as flawed as they are... then a setup of large battery with a small motor and modest fuel supply is best to achieve endurance and usability. Especially given that in most places gas is easy to find but a charging port isn't.
My personal preference is hydrogen fuel cell cars. By weight and volume liquid hydrogen has more energy than anything else and its actually quit easy to make. There are storage and handling issues but still we should be putting all our efforts into improving that technology not toying around with gas engines. Electric cars run on batteries should only be a jumping off point to ditch the batteries for a fuel cell IMHO.
I see what you mean. To use them as backup. But you will still no matter what always have some loss no matter what with every step you take away from the origional power source. Hybrid cars to me seem like the best option for pure efficiency. Using some electric and some gas allows for regenerative braking or I've heard some places are even toying with electronic generating suspension. There is a similar problem with hydrogen as with EV tho. In order to make hydrogen out of water. You need to run an electric current thru it. The problem here lies in that you need more electricity power to split the H2O than you will get energy from burning it. That's why when you try to make the perpetual motion machine where you burn hydrogen to power the generator to make the electricity to split the water and try to run the loop, it doesn't work for long. Eventually it sputters itself out. Crazy enough the most efficient way to make hydrogen comes from oil. It's a by product of making things like acetylene although I'm not sure how it works
On the plus side you can get regenerative braking which might give you a net gain for a stop and go all day vehicle.
Regenerative braking has also been done with flywheels and hydraulics.
That's not how physics works. If your driving the car in motion 50% of the time and regenerative breaking is 50% of the time but the power you get back is less than the cost of putting the car in motion because you don't gain energy in a transfer, only loss occurs. This is because of material inefficiency. Gold wires would get you closer (not exactly 1:1) but then no one could afford to buy it. you are in energy debt and analogous to any democrat run administration.