As for electric cars...
I don't have the time to do the calcs right now, but basically the answer is that to recharge a car enough to give it a decent range you need to pour in an obscene amount of electricity in a relatively short time. Recharging an electric car in less than two hours would require far more electricity than your household entrance can supply- and probably more than the distribution networks can handle. In order to do it at all, you'd need a huge bank of capacitors in your garage constantly drawing power from the grid, then discharge it fairly quickly into your car.

Now, aside from the power requirement and having to go from a 200 Amp entrance to about ten times that- how safe would you feel having all that power stored in your garage? It would be basically a hundred lightning storms attached to your house. One little glitch and Zeus hits your ass with everything he's got in a millisecond and you turn into vapor.

Thanks, but no.

Diesel looks to me to be the way of the future, especially biodiesel.
( The Resident Loon Not a demographic. Do not measure., Tue 23 Dec 2008, 18:15, Reply)