What about the Wheels

[mark57]

I'm not an enginer but why not use the wheels as sort of generators to produce recharging abilities to the battery when the car is driven. Could there be to half batteries one to recharge from a plug in type source say over night or while at work and the second battery to receive recharging from the wheele motion?

[GearheadGeek]

You're basically describing a perpetual motion machine. You have to understand that motors and generators aren't 100% efficient, if you could recover 100% of the energy you'd never need power, and you'd violate the laws of thermodynamics.

The energy you'd generate from the "wheel generators" would be less than the amount of drag you'd place on the car, so you'd make it LESS efficient than it will be as GM has designed it.

[darthvader420]

Electric cars use regenerative breaking, the electric motor turns into a generator and converts some of the kinetic energy of the car back into electricity. Using the motion of the wheels to generate electricity is what slows the car down. Much more efficient than the crappy cars we drive today, where at best 15% of the energy in the gasoline propels the car and all of that energy is lost when breaking, turned into heat and noise and break pad particles all over the road.

[Altazi]

I'm not an enginer but why not use the wheels as sort of generators to produce recharging abilities to the battery when the car is driven. Could there be to half batteries one to recharge from a plug in type source say over night or while at work and the second battery to receive recharging from the wheele motion?

They already plan to use the wheels as generators - it's called regenerative braking, and only comes into play when the car is decelerating. Simplified: When the brake pedal is pushed, instead of wasting all of the energy needed to slow the car as heat in the brake pads, a portion of the energy is stored back into the primary battery.