Thanks for the link. And yeah, the parasitic losses thing has been on my radar since I was in high school (early 70’s). I remember getting an electric remote control car in the mid 70’s that did 30 mph. I was amazed at how reliable and trouble free it was compared to the fuel powered RC cars. And thee torque was impressinve.
I never thought about it before your post, but the engine is not the only thing that can be simplified by going electric. Maybe it will just be the last. Perhaps cars could someday be like diesel-electric trains. The IC engine only supplies power to everything else, including the motor that drives the wheels.
That’s what frustrates me about these greenie weenies. You get ecomentalists like Ozero and his liberal ilk trying to drag people into useless electric cars, or wind-power for electricity (ask Texas how well that worked out recently), or banning incandescent lightbulbs. You don’t hear about them accepting that we WILL be dependent on fossil fuels for the near term and there’s no way around that!
We need to drill, drill, drill, dig, dig, dig. There’s nothing wrong with looking 20 or 30 or 40 years down the road at things like fuel cells or electric cars, but in the meantime, we need to look at what we can do NOW to make fossil fuel use more efficient, because they aren’t going anywhere in most of our lifetimes. For example, they have diesel cars in Europe that can get 60-70 mpg while still offering room for four or five and reasonable performance. Why don’t we get those here? A combination of ecoweenies going “DIESEL COOTIES! EEWWW!!” and the Big Three lobbying Congress to keep them out. Those obstacles need to be removed so we can get things like that over here. They may sell, they may not, but at least let them compete in the market.
Get the government out of the way and encourage free-market innovation, and watch what happens.
}:-)4