It does because instead of directly burning said fossil fuel, you are indirectly burning it. This abstraction if you will allows change or improvement to the source of the electricity in a way that you cannot do with gasoline.
It's not. Even the worst, dirtiest coal plant is going to be more efficient than your car engine, since it converts much more of the energy (given of as heat) into electricity. Economies of scale definitely apply to power plants.
Gas powered motors are still less brittle than grid-powered ones - it'd be tough to power a military force on grid power for example, but at that scale we should be using local fission powerplants anyway (ie, nuke subs).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inves...
TLDR: Electric vehicles still win, but only just barely when you include the battery manufacturing costs.
The paragraph on that page that mentions batteries is not at all rigorous - it doesn't attempt to be. The statement "It could be predicted that most Priuses will be junked at age 10 years" strikes me as pretty contentious.
Similar to hybrid cars. They are better for the environment but that isn't that offset by the production of the batteries needed for the hybrid engine?
No. By abstracting the source of the energy, we can make one change in the method of power generation and immediately make a large number of electric cars "clean". So if we replace a coal plant with a nuclear or hydroelectric or solar plant, then everyone charging their electric cars with energy from that plant will suddenly be using clean energy. This isn't possible with the millions of gas cars out there, because they are only capable of using gas.
No. The oft-cited "Dust to Dust" report has been thoroughly debunked: http://grist.org/article/dust-to-dumb/ For just one example, they assume (with no real justification) that a Hummer will last 300k miles and a Prius just 100k. Invalidating that single assumption flips the result, and it's not the only one.
There's a false equivocacy going on in our heads when we fall victim to this kind of misinformation. "One advantage vs. one disadvantage. They must cancel out!" This is why it's important to do quantitative analysis. In reality, the addition of a battery and motor only adds about 10% to the embodied energy and disposal impact of a car, which itself is dwarfed by the fuel burned in its lifetime (by about 3:1).
The interesting question for me is: why do people worry about the Nickel in their car's battery but not in their car's steel-alloy frame?
0 mpg - stopped at a light
15 mpg - typical city driving
35 mpg - typical highway driving
A powerplant is always running its turbines. It's like car motor that is always on cruise control on the highway, without giving up energy to stop in traffic or throttle down.
The peak energy usage is normally right around dusk, since that is when people are getting home from work, lights are coming on, etc. If people charge their cars at this time that only makes things worse. Hopefully we get smart chargers that slow charging at this time, so while it doesn't cause a huge peak the car is still charging, and then increases charging power during the night. Just a thought.
"Oh, electric cars are no good - we need hydrogen cars!" Or something like that. Who's saying that? Seemed to be energy companies, but it's IIRC. Electric cars allow for any energy source to be used (as well as multiple), in the generation of the electricity. I suspect a lot of people don't want that flexibility/freedom, and would instead prefer to lock down a few more generations of drivers to one specific type of fuel, even if it's not gas.