Image description: An electric car, 1912
(Originally published on toot.wales: 2024-03-14) - Click the Fedi-Link to visit.
this post was submitted on 02 May 2024
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Apparently it was quite the battle between electric and gas back then. Hybrids even came out. But the design of the gas motor improved and batteries were shit back then, so gas won.
The energy density of gasoline is great, but the ratio of joules to kinetic energy in anything but a tiny car is piss poor compared with modern battery electric vehicles. I've read that you get something like 13% of the gasoline's potential energy transformed into force on the tires. This varies according to the quality of the vehicle, of course.
Not really the metric that mattered at the time. It was energy, or distance you could drive, per kg and per liter. Gasoline is dense.