Ask the Best and Brightest: Wave Disc Engine?

What the good Professor says (I think) is you can go 3.5 times further than a "regular" hybrid vehicle or 5 times further than an otherwise normal SUV (which I guess means hybridising the SUV first, then the 3.5x rule applies). In other words; 20MPG turns into 100MPG. Anyway you look at it, that's a very big claim.

@ udham In my day-to-day work on and around energy projects we normally work with the "local" efficiency. It's an extremely complex task otherwise. People attempt it in the form of "Carbon Accounting", but that's a controversial subject (for some). In your rebuttal of the Tesla example, you could also make the same argument about MPG not taking into account the upstream energy costs of drilling, transporting and refining the fuel in a car. People don't (can't?) sit down to work that out. The only indicator as to what is going on, and it's highly distorted for ALL forms of energy, is the price per unit.

@PeteMoran I appreciate your response. I am not sure if my response was a "rebuttal" of sort. I was just trying to point out that there is more to what meets the eye as far as "efficiency" goes and that qualitative blanket statements are almost bound to be off. I agree that with oil, there is probably a relatively big added carbon cost of converting dino juice into the ground into something you can put into your tank. Of course, for coal/natural gas/oil fired plants, there is an added carbon cost of getting the carbon out of the ground and getting it to the power plant. So you are right, people are not going to want to figure out the intricacies of where their energy comes from, and exactly what their carbon footprint is. Maybe regulation is the answer, or maybe regulation leads to controversial and in my opinion asinine decisions like corn based ethanol being added to fuel.