I think one of the greatest and least talked about advantages of the electric car can be illustrated by the following graphs http://media.cns-snc.ca/ontarioele

I think one of the greatest and least talked about advantages of the electric car can be illustrated by the following graphs http://media.cns-snc.ca/ontarioelectricity/ontarioelectricity.html http://media.cns-snc.ca/ontarioelectricity/ontarioelectricit... The website displays Ontario's (Province in Canada) hourly electricity output and the source of the electricity. Daily electricity demand fluctuates in Ontario by thousands of MW, so much so that houses in Ontario are now fitted with time of use meters, which charge variable rates depending on the time of the day. These meters are going to be installed in your neighborhood if they aren't already. Now where do electric cars come into the mix? During the day, electricity consumption reaches a peak, and consumer prices are doubled from ~6c/KWh to ~12c/KWh. This isn't a cash grab, different facilities charge different rates for electricity generation depending on a bunch of different factors. With millions of electric cars, and with the aid of a "smart grid" that could learn to supply power to cars during the night and drain a small portion of power during the day, the massive fluctuations of electricity production through-out the day could be flattened out, and "dirty" backup plants could be taken offline. As a car owner, you could possibly be paid for you're car's storage capacity when electricity prices spike. Another benefit of going electric, the ICE (Internal Combustion Engine) is wasteful. ICEs work most efficiently at a specific rpm, which is hard to maintain when your car demands that torque to be dynamic, energy is lost at the transmission stage. ICEs need to be cooled down, the vast majority of energy is lost to heat. Take that same fuel but instead use it to power a steam turbine, and you capture much more thermal energy from the fuel. Electric motors also boast efficiency values upwards of 90% And finally, electric engines when at a stop don't use electricity. I don't know the stats on this one but I would have to bet that billions of liters of gas are burned each year at stop lights, traffic, and at warm up. You can also regenerate energy through breaking in an electric car, instead of turning it straight to heat at the break pad. Sure there are other points to be made, and sure my comment was probably disjointed, but as a mech eng, I lose sleep at how inefficient the ICE is. I dream of the day when battery density, and cost come down significantly and make it more affordable for a middle class family to own one of these cars.