https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_locomotive#Diesel–elect...
Obviously, ICEs that are strictly used to crank generators are common.
If you mean “is there data on whether that works in what is otherwise a battery-electric car”, that's called a series hybrid, and there are several production examples, including the Chevy Volt.
Long answer: Before WWII, there were luxury cars built this way. Manual transmissions were much harder to drive, so some luxury cars used a generator/motor pair as an automatic transmission.
WWII needs for copper drove them out of the market; and they never came back because it was simpler to just mate an oversized engine with a horrible automatic.
I don't think this is as cut and dried as you think. Generators are ~90% efficient. Gearboxes and differentials aren't 100% efficient either. If you are already carrying enough motor to propel you without an engine then you can size the ICE closer to average load than peak load potentially getting back a bit of efficiency.
If we can build batteries that don't source new cobalt from the DRC, (by using none or recycling) that would remove one ugly skeleton from the closet.
UBS Predicts EV Price Parity In 2024: https://cleantechnica.com/2020/10/22/ubs-predicts-ev-price-p...
In summary: Battery-electric cars will be "worth it" in 2022, and cost the same as a gas car in 2024.
Also: Tesla is very close to making its batteries cost the same as a gas car. What they are going to do is turn the bulk and weight of the battery into a structural member of the frame. (Recently announced on Battery Day.)
Sometime in the future, some of those arguments might be outdated, but they don't strike me that way now.
We still will have EVs with limited range and a lack of universal charging infrastructure. (I say this as the overall happy owner of a LEAF, but it's a bit of a toy rather than a car that I can rely on for all of my travel needs, relying on my wife's car and aircraft for distance travel and using the LEAF only around town.)
Increase fuel taxes to the level necessary for carbon neutrality and ICE vehicles look immediately unappealing.
1 gallon burnt emits 20lbs of CO2, and a ton is 2000 lbs, so 100 gallons of gasoline emits a ton of CO2.
With current technology takes $15-75 to pull a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere, or $0.15-0.75 to remediate a gallon of gasoline.
I argue a $1/gallon tax is the minimum viable, since we’ll need a carbon negative economy for the foreseeable future.
It’s not clear to me that $1 more per gallon of gas would kill ICE cars. If I ran a big auto maker, I’d actually lobby for such a tax, since it’s easier than retooling all the lines, and it pushes the cleanup costs onto legacy customers.
I personally think the tax should be paid upfront when you buy a new ICE car (assume it’ll last 100,000-200,000 miles), and not at the pump.
ICE is still the norm in Sweden, with EC standing for 3% of all personal cars. EC have however taken a significant chunk of new sales, with last month being 35%. It also help that all government workplaces over a certain size has free EC charging, and even some shopping centers.
At least CO2 can be scrubbed from the atmosphere.
> At least CO2 can be scrubbed from the atmosphere.
There is no evidence we can scale this up besides planting trees and hoping for the best.
This doesn't mean anything. Better is always relative.
The real problem is powering them. Batteries have a terrible energy density compared to hydrocarbon fuels and charge slowly, fuel cells don't seem to take off, and using an internal combustion engine to power an electric engine doesn't really solve anything. In fact, the simple fact that powering an electric engine with an ICE may be a good idea speak volume about both the superiority of electric engines and the difficulty of powering them.
So yes, the electric motor's dominance is inevitable, but we are not there yet. Battery technology is just starting to become viable, but electric cars are still heavy and expensive, have limited range and we don't really have a good, universal charging infrastructure yet. It is not because of "the best efforts of politicians", it is because it is technology that is just starting to become viable.