3 ms·

Passenger-hour is not an appropriate metric here. passenger-miles is. But I should point out here that electric cars usually get 100mpge or better. And it's al

Passenger-hour is not an appropriate metric here. passenger-miles is. But I should point out here that electric cars usually get 100mpge or better. And it's already feasible to do road trips in a Tesla. I'll be doing a (short) road trip with my first-gen Leaf. For domestic trips, we can replace air travel with regional electric buses in the near term and electric airplanes in the mid-term. In the far-term, we can do even long-haul air travel using lithium-air batteries or very high performance lithium/sulfur or lithium metal anode batteries and extremely efficient airframes and multiple hops. That'd be faster and cheaper (at least in the US with high infrastructure costs) than high speed rail.

esotericn 7y ago
> electric cars usually get 100mpge or better Right, and the mpge metric is flawed, because it assumes a (typically bad) energy mix. 5km driven in the UK is equivalent to 100km driven in Sweden. The former sits at an average of approx. 300gCO2e/kWh. The latter at 15gCO2e/kWh. With electric cars, the ultimate situation is that all of the carbon cost is in the production of the car/roads and maintenance thereof. Which is another issue that can be targeted and mitigated. By contrast the only ultimate hope for a combustion powered plane or car is carbon capture. The 'MPGe' of an electric car in a country with 90%+ renewable energy is like, 1000 or something daft like that.