It's not very efficient, certainly not enough to be "better" than a conventional IC-engined car. You're carrying around a lot of batteries, motor, and generato

It's not very efficient, certainly not enough to be "better" than a conventional IC-engined car. You're carrying around a lot of batteries, motor, and generator that are basically just dead weight. A petrol engine and gearbox is light. In trains it works quite well because you need an immense amount of torque to pull away, proportionately far far more than you need from even a large truck, and then you need a relatively small amount of power to keep it moving. Having a big generator driving bogey-mounted traction motors with simple reduction boxes means you don't need a huge gearbox and very complicated driveshaft system, and you don't care so much about weight.