I remember seeing, on pages of this forum, so many photos of electrical trams and cars on the streets of various US cities. We know that they disappeared at some point and quite suddenly. Some people concluded. that they were a part of a previous civilizations...
Apparently, the answer is much more simple and I came across it this morning: GM killed them all!
Americans and Automobiles: Capitalism and Propaganda
In the article it says that if electric cars were not killed off in 1900's, we would have now more than 100 years of intense battery research and development and benefits to the world’s environment and we would see battery being used at land, sea and
air (!) transport
This is Pollyanna day dreaming. First off, the battery technology is already being developed for 100 years. Second, the battery's energy storage / weight ratio has its physical limits and that limit is already been reached by the year 2020. It's roughly about 100 kWh / 700kg for a typical high-end electric car. The ratio for the gasoline is 9030 kWh / 700kg (considering the specific energy of gasoline 12.9 kWh/kg) When we apply the stored energy to kinetic (useful for mileage) energy ratios of about %90 for electric motor and %35 for the gasoline engine, we get
90kWh / 700kg for electric car
3160 kWh / 700kg for gasoline engine car
So you see the gasoline engine car's reach is 35x higher than electric car which might also be expressed as electric car's reach is 35x worse than gasoline engine car. For that reason alone, it's
definitely futile, practically impossible to use battery for
air transport. Anyway, we don't see any battery powered aircraft of any sort and we never will.
The electric could be pseudo practical only in cars of 2-5 passengers because in that case the 500 to 750kg heavy battery could find a suitable place to fit in: Beneath the passenger cabin. That's actually why all electric cars are 4 door sedans: Only 4 door sedans can accommodate that big and heavy battery which could provide 500-600kms of mileage at best (when driven at 90km/h on flat roads at 20°C) and that 500-600 kms of mileage is kind of a threshold to establish the electric cars as viable vehicles. That threshold is much harder to achieve in the smaller, 2 door Coupés, that's why we almost never see Coupé electric cars because they wouldn't hit that threshold.
