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Re:How Tesla-Toyota Project Led to Culture Clash by Opposites by rayiner on Tuesday August 12, 2014 @04:56PM (#8170110)
> As someone who builds his businesses by reasoning from first principles, he justifiably doesn't understand the idea of swapping a 20% efficient (if you're very lucky) combustion engine with a 10% efficient, experimental fuel cell when you could instead use a dead simple, clean and 80%+ efficient electric motor.

You're comparing apples and oranges. That electricity isn't generated via a particularly efficient mechanism after all.

Re:How Tesla-Toyota Project Led to Culture Clash by Opposites by revelation on Tuesday August 12, 2014 @05:22PM (#8170275)
Sure, I mean this is where it gets complicated and subjective.

If we consider a solar cell with top of the line 15% efficiency and use that to charge our electric car, of course the overall efficiency takes a sharp drop. But I don't think it is useful to include the efficiency of the solar cell in the calculation here. After all, the 85% that the solar cell couldn't convert into electricity aren't useable by any other way known to man either; the loss is neither here nor there because we can't do better utilizing the sun than with current gen solar panels.

If you consider, however, that oil refineries consume significant amounts of electricity (from the grid, no electricity equivalents here) to refine oil into something our cars can use, that is certainly a factor we need to include in the efficiency calculation for gasoline powered cars. That electricity could have been used to power an electric car, after all, so there was an actual loss here.

Re:How Tesla-Toyota Project Led to Culture Clash by Opposites by toomuchtodo on Tuesday August 12, 2014 @04:59PM (#8170138)
Can you explain how power generated for electrolysis is more efficient than that used to directly charge electric vehicles?

Unless you're talking about converting natural gas or coal directly to hydrogen, which is just as asinine.

Re:How Tesla-Toyota Project Led to Culture Clash by Opposites by Aqueous on Tuesday August 12, 2014 @05:00PM (#8170141)
Combustion engines (and cells) are for the most part less efficient than our least efficient power generation plants combined with the grid.
Re:How Tesla-Toyota Project Led to Culture Clash by Opposites by rayiner on Tuesday August 12, 2014 @05:10PM (#8170206)
That may be so, but that doesn't mean that the string of numbers he rattled off should be compared to each other.