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Originally Posted by Chief
From their FAQ
Don't electric vehicles actually just move pollution to another location? And therefore don't EVs still use oil?
No. Electric power generation in the USA does not use oil. Coal, hydro, nuclear, solar, and natural gas are typical sources for generating electricity. Power generation plants, even coal burning ones, are inherently more efficient and less polluting than vehicles due to economies of scale and the ability to more efficiently remove pollutants from a smaller number of much larger fixed locations.
Also, an electric car is far more efficient than a gasoline car, so the amount of pollution generated by producing the electricity to drive an EV a given distance is much less than the pollution from the gasoline to drive an internal combustion car the same distance.
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While the oil use of a car like this is greatly reduced, the energy consumed over the cars lifetime is actually FAR MORE than a normal car. What people don't realise is that it takes more energy to build a car than it will to run it for it's entire life, and cars like this require more energy to build than regular cars - for example, a Toyota Prius will, over it's lifetime, require more energy to build and run than a regular SUV.
Bioethanol might be an option if you want to reduce reliance on oil (
Here's a Lotus Exige that runs on the stuff), but it also has problems - fuel efficiency will plummet, it's inefficient to produce (You'd need the equivalent of one and a half gallons of bioethanol to refine a single gallon of bioethanol) and don't expect all cars to be running on it unless you fancy starving to death because there's nowhere left to grow regular crops.