Yes it externalizes it. But it centralises it too, making it easier to keep it clean. It also removes the pollution from town centres making them much pleasanter places to be. The total efficiency of burning oil in a large power station to power electric cars is generally is slightly better than burning the oil (which must be much more highly refined) in an internal combustion engine even if it is a hybrid.
There's also that you have to burn fuel in the tank trucks to get the fuel to the consumer.
Centralized generation is vaguely like dependency injection, or loosely coupled modularity in general, you can put what you want into it.
My only concern with electric vehicles is battery end of life. What do I the consumer do? Will I be able to sell my 25 year old EV? Have we gotten far enough to see what that end looks like?
You use/lose some of the energy in transport, either way. I forget exactly, but high voltage power lines lose something like 1% of their energy every...100 miles?
Another way to look at it would be: How much electricity would it take an electric truck to deliver that gasoline?
By that argument, you lose energy when gasoline evaporates during transportation. In both cases (electricity and gasoline) loss is marginal and can be mitigated by striking a balance between centralization and transport/power line distance.
> By that argument, you lose energy when gasoline evaporates during transportation.
Please show me where gasoline is being shipped in open vessels for that argument to hold water. Oil tankers? Sealed. Tanker trucks? Sealed. Your car's gas tank? Sealed.
Marginal doesn't necessarily mean small, but that it's proportional to the overall cost. In economics your fixed costs (eg the cost of building and equipping a factory or an oil field or whatever) go down as a percentage of unit price as you produce more goods, whereas your marginal costs are a function of production (eg transmission losses, taxes, raw materials, labor-per-piece).
