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An idling gas engine may be annoyingly loud, but that’s the price you pay for having WAY less torque available at a standstill.

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13 points

Thing is that pound of gas is gone, that pound of battery is still there and ready for recharge.

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19 points

A pound of dead battery doesn’t help me when I’m camping 10km from the nearest access to the power grid. (There are actually powerlines not even a kilometre from my favourite campsite, but those are going to be measured in kV, and so aren’t really useful to me.)

Now, if I had enough solar panels in a mobile setup, probably folding out of a trailer, I could make it work, but solar panels are expensive.

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3 points

But solar panel costs are falling way faster than battery costs.

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5 points

Sure, but even then there are plenty of cases where a solar panel doesn’t make much sense either. If you’re cutting down a tree in the woods, would you rather grab your gas-powered chainsaw out of your truck and cut down the tree, or grab your solar-powered chainsaw out of your truck, spend minutes setting up solar panels to pick up the small amount of sunlight which makes it to the forest floor, and then cut down the tree?

The point is there will always be a market for ICEs until there are batteries with competitive energy density to gasoline. You don’t see solar- or battery-powered trains or construction/mining equipment because these things need huge amounts of energy to work, energy which can be easily stored in a fairly small fuel tank (which can be quickly topped off when necessary).

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10 points

A dead battery is far worse than an empty jerry can, atleast the jerry can is light. Hell there are even some real nice collapsible ones and thats not even accounting for fuel bladders. Electric is useful but it is also rather rigid as well.

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