Battery capacity scales linearly (n) to material requirements , while a gas tank's capacity scales quadrically to material requirements (n^2, because of only using a surface of materials to store a volume).
I'd also assume the energy required to keep the tank cold relatively lower as the tanks gets larger.
This is still a problem we'll have to face. Road tear and wear grows exponentially with weight, and tire pollution (both noise and particles) is also nothing to be disregarded.
Also batteries require all sorts of raw materials with problematic provenance (e.g. lithium mines destroy the nearby environment, cobalt comes from child labour in terrible conditions, etc.). Cars with batteries are better than cars with internal combustion engines, but still expensive, inefficient, polluting and wasteful as the main means of transportation of every human being on the planet.
Road wear actually grows with the 4th power of weight, not the weight in the exponent, but that is a really bad argument regardless because trucks exist.
I thought something like 90%+ of road wear and tear was due to tractor trailers, dump trucks, and other massive vehicles. Meanwhile cars were a rounding error. Do EVs change that?
It might not be incredibly fast or even useful it does show we don't need to put the engine on the vehicle (entirely)
I just imagined a hilarious contraption using slow moving water in a canal. A screw is inserted in the stream driven by a wheel on the road. As long as the speed at which the road moves is different from the speed of the water you can keep extracting more speed from the flow. (haha)
