Quote Originally Posted by mknight View Post
Now you are starting to mix things together and even contradict yourself:

- primary power source is an issue. I guess most people agree that pumping dead dinosaurs is not sustainable in the long term.
Electricity in a battery, hydrogen or synthetic fuel is just a transport medium. Out of these batteries are at the moment most efficient and I don't see that changing in near future (15-20 years), but off course it's possible it will change at some point.

- "cabling" is an issue that can be slowly compensated for, as the demand grows. Load balancing is in many ways the fastest solution (no charging when energy demand is highest in the evening or early morning). To compare with hydrogen you would need to include distribution (by lorries?), production is already handled in previous point. Thing is, there is an existing electric grid that you can use and upgrade... there is no "hydrogen grid".

- battery production and end of life, that is the area that experiences most changes. Some problematic minerals are less and less used in battery production already. On the other end of the line old batteries are not thrown to trash after few years but often used for many years for other uses (for example for solar/wind power balancing) after they are taken out from the car. In the end you have a concentrated "brick of pollution" of some 200kg in 4x2x0,2 m instead of "tiny" pollution distributed all over the atmosphere (CO2, NOX...) and inside people's lungs (particles).
Agreed completely.

About the grid throughput - an expert from the grid company here in Estonia said that each car in our capital Tallinn could be changed to EV and have sufficient electricity available (even with electricity surplus) for charging just by changing the street lightning to LED-s. Average distance driven in a day is just 40 km.

Also, does anyone here have real world long-term experience with an EV? I have had an EV for nearly 3 years now and it has driven 70 000 km so far. Still 100% of the battery capacity that was useable when it was new is useable now because the top buffer is large enough so degradation is not noticeable to the user for quite some time. I will probably see some degradation in the coming years, but the battery easily outlives the car as does the electric motor. And when it finally reaches its end it can be recycled at about 95% efficiency. And as mknight said the battery tech will keep evolving and less and less problematic minerals are being used. Hydrogen seems sexy from a far (I can actually understand it - it is relatable to the people that are used to put petrol in the cars) thats why some politicians also seem to like it, but in reality it is a very inefficient way and only has point when there is electricity surplus.

Finally cali has a fair point that EV-s or any other type of cars can not not save the planet, we generally need less cars on the road, that's the ultimate solution.