cannuck
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To be precise, a car does not "generate" energy, it uses some and stores some. The energy it uses was "generated" in a solar furnace 93MM miles away. The energy to spin your pinwheels in the grille came from the energy stored in the fuel. Add the power generation of those pinwheels and their generator to the whole thing, and it costs you the extra drag from turning them, less the inefficiencies of the engine that burned the fuel (maybe 35% efficient) and the inefficiencies of the propeller and generator (probably no more than 40% efficient on a good day, so your energy saving device will cost you 1/(.35 x .4) or about 7 times what you "generated". Everything you incorporate into the car to try to recover some of the energy you can NOT avoid using (regenerative braking for instance) not only has inefficiencies in operation, but you now have to spend the money and the fuel to drag all of that stuff around until you need it. So the energy recovery potential is not that great.A car in motion generates way more energy than what a basic car battery can hold. Why not have bigger batteries or multiple batteries to capture the extra juice? Not to mention you could put "pin wheels" on the inside of a cars grill that would spin via air creating even more energy.. The heat generated by an engine could also be used.
I suppose my point is that a vehicle generates so much energy but the typical vehicle only recycles 10% of the energy it creates.
One shouldn't have to plug their car into a wall outlet - that is just stupid and unnecessary.
There is no such thing as "free energy" however in theory a car could recycle it's energy....
What really matters is that Americans by and larger don't give a flying purple frick about efficiency. You have been able to buy 50+ MPG diesel cars from VW almost continuously since 1978, and how many did you ever see on the road? Europeans - who DO care a BIT more about such things - have been able to buy 80+ mpg VW cars since 1995 (3 litre Lupo) and will soon be able to buy a nice, two seat commuter that gets about 270mpg overall. If it was for sale here, nobody but a few elderly hippies with big trust accounts would spend the bux to buy one. Instead we buiy SUVs and pickups to compete with each other for how much fuel we can waste.
Of course, if you/me/we gave a damn about resource waste, we would simply stay home or ride public transport.
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