Subject: Re: BRK: Why Not XOM?
It’s easy to imagine the worst possibilities … EVs are not the perfect vehicle for everyone

I saw this a while ago and it certainly answers a lot of the objections:

Imagine if we were driving EVs for 100 years and then someone invented the internal combustion engine.

This device is at best 30% efficient in converting the energy in the fuel to motive power. They are so inefficient that they have to carry 250kWh of fuel to travel 400km.
The engines are very noisy and must rotate at very high speed to develop a decent amount of power, so they have to have a clumsy gearbox.

The fuel it runs on must be extracted from wells deep beneath the earth or the sea, causing a lot of pollution. The amount available in these wells is limited and will expire in a relatively short time. It gets gummy and goes bad quickly once distilled into gasoline, so it must be extracted, refined, transported, and consumed all within a short cycle.

This “crude” oil must be transported on ships, causing more pollution. It must be processed in a refinery, using a lot of energy and causing more pollution. Sulphur must be removed or sulphuric acid will be generated in the combustion system, this is done using Cobalt in a catalytic converter.

It must then be transported to fuel stations for retailing, again more pollution.
When burned in the engine particles are emitted from an exhaust pipe along with NOx and SOx, presenting health hazards and worse still Carbon Dioxide which causes the climate of the planet to change resulting in an existential threat. Carbon Monoxide is also emitted with the danger of suffocation and death if operated in an enclosed space.

These combustion engines would have to have hundreds of moving parts, requiring a lot of maintenance and worse still lubricating oil which becomes contaminated and must be changed regularly, resulting in, you guessed it, even more pollution.

Spillages of oil from fuel tanks and transportation vehicles would cause other road vehicles to skid and crash, causing injuries and death.

When going up a hill these vehicles consume a lot of fuel, however, when descending they cannot put the fuel back in the tank by regeneration but must instead use their brakes, causing more wear, tear and pollution.

Why would anyone bother?