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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Gas ICE cars are horribly inefficient. Even with the best modern tech, ICE waste most energy in gasoline as heat.  It's simply the laws of thermodynamics.   Iir, something like 35% of the energy in gas is used to move the vehicle. 65% of the money you spend on gas is wasted.

Contrast that to EVs. Electric is so much more efficient.  The majority of the energy in batteries is used for actual motion of the car..[/quote]

You are comparing apples to oranges. The ICE vehicle is an energy conversion machine, whereas the EV is a post-energy conversion machine.

If you are charging the EV with solar, you are only going to capture about 30% of the raw energy that hits the panel (theoretical limit of energy that solar can capture is about 35% —of course the sun is so abundant that this inefficiency can be lived with).  If you are charging with natural gas-derived electricity, depending on the technology, you are going to lose anywhere from 40 to 70% of the energy you started with in the natural gas molecule converting it to electricity (you’ll lose more in transmission). Coal will be worse. And we haven’t even talked about the 5-20% energy loss in the battery charging process.

If you normalize it, you’ll find that both electric and ICE are pretty inefficient. 
[/quote]

With solar and EVs you can just get more energy from the sun.  With internal combustion, once you've burned it, it's gone.  We're burning through the equivalent of millions of years worth of fossilized accumulated biomass.

A friend just got back from visiting Beijing for the first time in 10 years.  He was shocked at how far China has come, through the use of EVs and renewables.  Their air quality has improved dramatically, they use solar and wind and use hydro reservoirs to store generated electricity to even out for peak demand times and night time use and so on.  They are actually on an aggressive path of clean and renewable, making investments that we stopped investing in.  We are falling behind.[/quote]

What kind of cars were they driving?  I already drive a Subaru Impreza, I don't see the functional difference between that and a Tesla.  I really don't think my trading buying an EV instead will move the needle.  It will likely cause a bigger amount of environmental damage to manufacture the Tesla, lithium, copper etc.

China mostly doesn't drive cars anyway.  They are actually growing their car transportation base, most of the cleanups were likely realized in industry.

Let me know when the big boys in their SUVs go EV when they sit in traffic to get to their political fund raiser down in DC.[/quote]

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