Well I've been reading up on it quite a lot, and for example in the US, only 2% of electricity is generated from oil. Nationally, around half is produced by burning coal. The rest is hydro, wind, nuclear, solar.
One very important thing to keep in mind though is that there is less resulting pollution by burning coal for producing electricity in a power plant at 60% efficiency, than burning gasoline in an internal combustion engine. Plus you remove the smog from the cities. So even if all the electricity produced was made by burning coal, we would have less pollution driving electric. But electricity can be produced from a number of sources, many clean, so you have a much bigger advantage.
Is pushing electricity through cables more efficient than transporting fuel to gas stations.
You may see comparisons of efficiency between say burning coal>electricity>cables>your car, with efficiency of an internal combustion engine. First of all, this comparison is flawed because it doesn't take into account the energy needed to drill>extract>refine>ship by sea>ship again to gas stations. But even doing this flawed comparison, an electric vehicle comes out on top with much better efficiency.
You will also see these flawed comparisons with hydrogen, they assume the hydrogen will magically appear in your car.
What materials are involved in building an electric car?
Most of the materials in Li-Ion batteries can be recycled, and newer types of Li-Ion batteries are safer than the exploding ones. But even considering the older ones, I'd say they are a lot safer than carrying around 60 liters of highly flammable liquid around in your car.
Lots of interesting info on the Tesla Motors blog:
http://teslamotors.com/blog1/index.php?js_enabled=1
One really eye opening example in this blog:
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog1/index. ... _enabled=1
There's an image there showing how much land area is required to offset 50% of miles driven in the US. Comparing photo voltaic, cellulosic ethanol, and corn based ethanol.
What I find particularly dumb is the push towards hydrogen fuel cells for cars, when they haven't even figured out how to store it properly. Not to mention if you take into account the energy needed to produce the hydrogen, an electric vehicle is much more efficient. Plus you would need to convert all gas stations to hydrogen stations....all this would take at least 20 years, while we already have perfectly fine electric cars, which you can charge at home. So much government money wasted on hydrogen, and even the European Fuel Cell Forum has a report saying that fuel cells is not a good idea for transportation use:
http://www.efcf.com/reports/E17.pdf
Check especially page 11.
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