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Re:Why Electric Cars Will Be Here Sooner Than You Think by gremlinsinc on Sunday August 28, 2016 @10:28PM (#12379611)
Why can't the car generate electricity and last like 5x as long? Each wheel could probably generate quite a bit of static electricity and refuel the tank. Honestly I think hybrids will be the go-to method for the next decade or two, unless they can get batteries to 500+ miles. -- If they get the battery to 1000 miles though it's game over for gasoline cars though.
Re:Why Electric Cars Will Be Here Sooner Than You Think by WilliamDhalgren on Monday August 29, 2016 @11:26AM (#12382495)
yeah, plug-in hybrids seem like the best of both worlds; that could still let you go all-electric for the ~90% of your commutes, but w/o the range anxiety or limits to your occasional longer trips. And the fact you end up occasionally driving it like a (hyper-efficient) gasoline car is a totally negligable quantity of emissions in your overall driving.

It's quite possible you can have an all-electric range-extender with over 1000 miles; there was some talk Tesla was looking into current-gen Aluminium-air batteries for that purpose; afaik Al-air is currently the most mature metal-air battery with some actual deployment in limited applications. Downside for conventional aluminium-air is they can't just be recharged once you use up the charge, but the Aluminium needs to be mechanically replaced after the charge has been used up.

Practicalities of that exact scheme sound dubious, but the concept is promising; early gen of some metal-air batteries, even if rechargable could be quite limited in the number of cycles it can last, so be a poor fit for being the main battery bank of an EV car. As a range extender though, this is much less limiting, so could find first use like that, in practice giving 1000 miles range for occasional long trips.