why can’t electric cars be charged by their own movement?
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Some do. They use “regenerative breaking,” which takes the cars momentum and turns that into energy through magnetic breaks. It’s not 100% efficient though (and far from it).
Due to the “laws of thermodynamics,” no system can be 100% efficient. This means that if the electric motor produces 1 unit of force to move the car forward, some of that energy will be lost as heat (friction). Further, more energy will be lost as heat when we try to capture that energy back in the regenerative breaking.
This is also the same reason perpetual motion machines can never work. It would mean the PMM would not only have to be 100% efficient, but actually produce *more* energy than was used to make it move, which is impossible.
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