Seems like only a few years ago people were saying that battery powered cars weren't possible, you'd never be able to fit a big enough battery in there, they'd never have the range, weigh too much, be too expensive...
This is still a problem we'll have to face. Road tear and wear grows exponentially with weight, and tire pollution (both noise and particles) is also nothing to be disregarded.
Also batteries require all sorts of raw materials with problematic provenance (e.g. lithium mines destroy the nearby environment, cobalt comes from child labour in terrible conditions, etc.). Cars with batteries are better than cars with internal combustion engines, but still expensive, inefficient, polluting and wasteful as the main means of transportation of every human being on the planet.
> Road tear and wear grows exponentially with weight
Road wear actually grows with the 4th power of weight, not the weight in the exponent, but that is a really bad argument regardless because trucks exist.
> Road tear and wear grows exponentially with weight
I thought something like 90%+ of road wear and tear was due to tractor trailers, dump trucks, and other massive vehicles. Meanwhile cars were a rounding error. Do EVs change that?
100+ years ago someone in France build a tunnel for horse and carriage with a propeller and a steam engine on both ends. The tunnel went down at the start helping acceleration and up at the end to slow the cart down.
It might not be incredibly fast or even useful it does show we don't need to put the engine on the vehicle (entirely)
I just imagined a hilarious contraption using slow moving water in a canal. A screw is inserted in the stream driven by a wheel on the road. As long as the speed at which the road moves is different from the speed of the water you can keep extracting more speed from the flow. (haha)
Which does not change the fact, that mining and refining of raw materials to make batteries so you can repeat the cycle again in 10 years does not scale as making steel tanks.
