In reply to timjones:
Tim, you raise some very legitimate concerns which need addressing. I'll try to be as brief as possible, but I'm sure you will appreciate the subject is huge.
First, an ICE (internal combustion engine) is similar to a coal, gas and nuclear power plant in so much that they are all power plants. They all take a source of fuel and convert it in to energy. But unlike regular power plants an ICE power plant needs to be mobile. This places on it a large number of constraints:
- Size - it needs to be packed in to a small space
- Weight - it needs to be light enough
- Price - it needs to be cheap enough to be sold in the millions
- Conditions - it needs to be capable of handling inconsistent qualities of fuel, driven aggressively by some, operate at different rev ranges to handle different terrains, and work in a multitude of weather conditions.
- Fuel - It must use a fuel that lends itself to the above constraints, i.e. we don't have coal powered engines as they would not work well under the above constraints.
All of these constraints mean that it is impossible to engineer the ICE so that it may work at optimum efficiency. It must by design compromise. Put simply the sum of 100's or 1000's of mini compromised power-plants will always be less efficient than one centralised power-plant that is optimised for perfect conditions.
Once the energy has been generated the same argument applies to the waste fumes. In a big power plant all the waste heat is used to generate a turbine and produce even more electricity and they can also afford to have best in class carbon capture measures. You simply cant do this on a mobile car.
It's also worth asking the question, if ICE was so efficient, why do we not use it to run our appliances? Well the answer is that it is toxic. So why don't we put an ICE power plant outside of every house instead of being connected to the gird? For that matter why is the grid not powered by an ICE power plant.
Moving on, a very important point which is consistently overlooked is that oil needs refining and refining uses up a ton of power from the grid. This short video presents the point in a really good way, but I will summarise.
The energy supplied by the grid to refine one gallon of petrol is enough to drive a Tesla Model S 12-15 miles. All before you factor in:
- The environmental cost of extracting the stuff from the ground
- Shipping across the world and delivering it to the refiners
- Sticking it in to a Tanker and driving it to the forecourt (which requires it's own refined fuel)
- Before finally pumping in to your car and burning it.
EVs are not perfect and they have environmental costs well to wheel of their own but a lot of the materials, including the battery can be recycled to be used over and over again which means less need brought up from the ground. Further more, the environmental benefits of EVs over ICE now are only half the picture. A concerted effort to clean up the grid must also take place and when cleaner energy is produced the EV's emissions are reduced even further.
I've really only scratched the surface here but hopefully I've made sense and would welcome any further questions you might have.
To clarify one other point, you suggested the car can only do 200 miles if the conditions are right. - Not so, an ICE vehicle might achieve 50mpg if you drive at a steady speed, but if you are constantly accelerating, and going up and down hills you can easily achieve 40mpg or less. Similarly you experience the same fluctuations in energy performance in an EV which we describe as Wh/m (watts per mile) the miles is flipped over to the other side of the equation, so in our case a larger number of watts per mile is less desirable. So the Tesla S85 will do 243 miles, but we knew we had the Abington Supercharger to fall back on so we could afford to be more spirited in our driving. Since Superchargers will refill at up to 350 miles of range per hour (120kW), we would need to drive extremely inefficiently to use energy faster than the Supercharger could refill and therefore negatively impact our time.