Even in its infancy, this technology is proving to leave a smaller carbon footprint than their petrol gulping counterparts (comparing emissions based on the electricity required to charge the car).
If you compared the overall emissions balance it wouldn't look so good.
Also worth noting is that electric engines are much smaller than internal combustion engines, leaving far more room for storage.
That extra space is taken up by the batteries :D
Not trying to bash electric cars, but the technology and infrastructure still has a long way to go.
It does, but I think the emissions balance is being distorted by both sides and at worst is pretty close
When battery technology improves it's unlikely that petrol powered cars will emerge as the victor in the long term
Batteries are still quite small relatively, teslas have a large trunk both in the back and front
I'm very sceptical about the environmental impact of those batteries.
It would also surprise me, if they made a major leap in this technology. It's been around for so long.
I think the technology here hasn't made gains like in other parts of the tech industry, like it certainly doesn't follow Moore's law, i'll grant you that
But there has been substantial gains over time, if you look at the size vs mah on your phone batteries over time, you'll see very significant improvements
Well, the biggest problem here is something that most people don't know about.
Gasoline is a waste product. When cracking oil you get a stack of outputs. And, if you stopped using gasoline for cars, then half of the oil wouldn't be used.
Electric motors are much smaller than an internal combustion engine, but batteries are MUCH LARGER than a tank of gasoline.
Oil is the most useful substance on earth. There are thousands of uses for it.
And, like I said, gasoline is a waste product. So, if humanity is going to stop using oil (and gasoline) then we have to replace every part that we currently use oil for. It is not undoable, and will probably be inevitable sometime in the future but there is such a huge supply chain to rework.
I believe other technologies are going to come in and completely change the paradigm of driving long before we work out a viable battery to replace all gasoline vehicles.
Major innovations are in the works in battery technology. Some stuff is ridiculously advanced. In the next 5 years, we should see 10x improvements in battery tech.
yep, that seems to be the bottle neck and the area that we've made the least progress historically, although far from no progress
But we do need a breakthrough here