OK, so excuse the provocative title. Perhaps it is better to say that electric cars and solar power wastes money. The last few weeks I have debunked ultracapacitor powered electric drills and supercapacitor powered electric cars. Now let’s look at electric cars in general. Be aware that I spent ten years as an auto engineer, working for both GM and Ford in their product design groups. I also built an electric car of my own.

One issue with electric vehicles is that the discussions are dominated by scientist that do not have any idea how to make a technology practical and hobbyists that have an almost religious desire to promote electric cars.

Gasoline has 44 MJ (megaJoules) of energy per kg (kilogram). A car engine is about 20% efficient in turning that energy into mechanical work. So a kg of gas can do 8.8 MJ of mechanical energy. OK, a lithium ion battery has about 130 WH/kg according to A123 Systems, the current battery darling of the media. A joule is a watt-second so the A123 batteries have 468 kJ/kg. That is 19 times worse than the useful mechanical energy you can get out of gas. But wait; don’t forget that 50-kilowatt motor controllers are not 100% efficient, heck, 80% would be dreaming, so lithium ion is really more like 374kJ/kg. That is 23 times worse than gasoline.

An octave, a doubling or halving of a value, can be overcome. Decades are pretty tough. What this means is that you can make an electric car from a Go-1 carbon-fiber recumbent tricycle and get to work, like my buddy Dave Ruigh did. But you are not going to power a 4000-pound family sedan and have everything work the same. 11 gallons of gasoline weighs 30.7 kg. Those 11 gallons have 96.8 MJ of useful mechanical energy, the same as you could get from 259 kg of li-ion batteries. That’s 570 pounds of batteries. Now sure, the electric motor is way lighter than the gas engine and transmission. Maybe the power train difference is 400 pounds. But see, this is what he hobbyists and scientist don’t understand. OK, I am going to say this only once but you really have to pay attention: For every pound of payload weight you add in a car you have to add 3 pounds in structure with bigger brakes and thicker bumpers and stronger suspension. So the 400-pound power train hit turns into a 1200-pound penalty. And remember, although there are sure to be improvements in batteries, there are also sure to be improvements in internal combustion engines. Wikipedia says engines have 20% mechanical efficiency. I have seen claims of 30%. I know a diesel engine gets 30%. So that will make pure electric cars even more untenable.

Whizzing around in $100k electric roadsters is about being green. It is about making others green with envy that you can piss away that much money for a toy. In that sense it does have social utility, in mate selection. Like the male bird with bright plumage that goes around slapping its wings on the dirt, your Tesla may help you attract a better mate. But it will do it at the expense of the planet, much like an Escalade or Brooks Brothers suit.

And that, my friend, is where the dead babies in the title come from. The ads on TV say 33 dollars and month will save the life of some poor little pot-bellied third-world baby. So keeping that baby alive for five years costs about $2000. This is the basis for a unit of virtual currency defined as a struther, after actress Sally Struthers, who used to guilt us all out on TV as she whined about the poor starving children of the world. There are too many highway miles in the drive cycle of American consumers to justify hybrid cars. Carrying around the extra weight on the freeway hurts you more than you gain from the regenerative braking, unless you are driving at taxicab that does all stop and go city driving. So when you spend an extra 4 grand for the hybrid, you are costing the world 2 struthers. You are killing two cute little third-world babies. When the battery pack dies after 5 years you will get to kill a couple more. When you buy a $100k Tesla, you are wasting $100k that could be going to those starving children. That Tesla costs 50 struthers. That’s 50 babies you killed in order to be smug and self-absorbed.

Oh, I forgot. I was going to tell you about solar power. Once again, like my personal experience with electric cars, this analysis is based on fact, not fanboyz or marketing BS or greenie propaganda. My pal Frank just installed a solar panel setup on his guesthouse. It cost 30 grand but would have been 40 grand if he did not do the installation himself. Since the actuarial cost of 40 grand is in today’s dollars you have to do a present-value calculation. If Frank can get 7% interest, very achievable in a ten-year market, he is forgoing having 80 grand ten years from now. OK, he is saving what-- $2000 a year on electric bills? So he is saving 20 grand over ten years, so his net loss is 60 grand. That 60 grand is equivalent to 30 Struthers. So Frank is killing 30 babies as opposed to my Prius-driving pal John who is only killing 2.

Now I’m an analog guy so of course I think we should keep working on electric cars and solar power, I have a few ideas of my own I will write up this coming year. But don’t buy into this impractical overpriced fad and pretend you are technologically superior. And please don’t act like you are morally superior and saving the planet when you are really killing cute little babies.