sobayimage
Well-known member
The April issue of the Scientific American has an article about fossil fuels and on page 61 there is an enlightening diagram showing the advantage of electrically powered vehicles. The diagram gives the miles you can travel, on one Gigajoule of input into making the fuels and the distance a car will travel on that energy. When you use an average mileage of 30 miles per gallon for gasoline cars and 33 miles per gallon for diesel cars, based on EPA fuel economy estimates, the new car will travel 3,600 miles using gasoline whereas, an electric car will travel 6,500 miles. Gasoline comes from many sources, conventional oil, tar sands etc. as does electricity from hydro, wind power, coal, natural gas and solar. With an attempt balance out these differences, electric cars still make better use of the energy to propel a car.
