All I know is this:
THe battery gives you about what 1 gallon of gas gets you in terms of miles traveled.
1 gallon of gas is about 8 pounds. 1 rack of batteries that drives you as far as a gallon of gas is 560 pounds. That means you’re always hauling around 3-4-5 extra people in your car even when the batteries aren’t charged anymore.
1 gallon of gas costs $4.00 now, a relative high price for gas. The battery pack itself costs thousands of dollars, and charging it for ten hours at your rate of whatever per kw/h costs triple or quadruple a gallon of gas.
The physical volume of a gallon of gas is far less than the physical volume of the batteries required to store the electrical energy equivalent of one gallon of gas.
You can put one gallon of gas into your car in about 10 seconds. It takes ten hours to charge the batteries on a 120 volt line, about 5 on a 240 volt line.
You can store a gallon or more of gas in your garage and add it to your car as you need it, or even sell it to someone else who needs it if you don’t. You can’t keep spare battery packs around and just swap in a charged one while the other charges up. You can trade excess battery power to anyone else.
I can keep an emergency gallon of gas in my trunk if I need it. I can’t keep an emergency battery pack around to use when my current 560 pound battery pack runs out.
My gas car is not a much more severe electrical hazard in an accident setting. Can’t say that for hybrids or the volt.
And why is this car superior to hybrids that recharge the battery while driving and don’t require taxing the neighborhood grid for ten hours of power?
meant to say “you can’t trade excess battery power to someone else”, obviously.