A Chinese EV squeezed over 1,000 km of range from its 150 kWh battery - Mass production of the new battery will begin in April 2024.

Engineers don't find it difficult to believe.

You can, but the energy gained from the turbine will be less than the extra energy it takes to drive the vehicle now that there is a wind turbine attached.

You proposed it in the grill, but for simplicity let's put a wind turbine on the roof. To turn the blades, the wind needs to exert a force on them, and for the blades to not fly off the back of the vehicle, the vehicle needs to match that force. So now the vehicle is working harder to move forward.

It may be easier to visualize if you think of the turbine like a parachute. Once the car is up to speed, you release the turbine out of the back attached by a string. It will spin in the wind, and twist the string, but the car will slow down.

You could put this into the grill, or some part of the vehicle and fool yourself that it's not added force, but cars are designed for wind to go around them, not for wind to push on them. So no matter how you add a turbine, it's added wind resistance.

Ok, so uneducated, angry and easily offended. Happy to explain step by step but you need to check your attitude.

First of all, wind turbines are about 20-40% efficiency at turning wind energy into electric energy. So using an engine to create wind that then spins a turbine will only give you about 30% back - the rest is lost to drag, friction between gears an moving parts. Effectively, put a fan infront of a wind turbine and you lose three times the energy you get back. Put this in a car, the drag the turbine will produce spinning will use up 3 times the energy to keep the car moving compared to what you get. This drag from a spinning turbine is soo much that propeller planes have automatic systems in place that an engine failure won't make a plane uncontrollable by stopping the prop windmilling as much as possible. This doesn't matter for wind turbines as they 1, don't have to make themselves move, and 2, don't have to carry their own weight around.

In short, what you will get from doing this is drain the battery 3 times faster than you top it up. I.e pointless.

To answer your last point - yes, unlike you every engineer, scientist and designer in existence is too stupid to do this, patent their discovery and make billions in extending the range of EVs. That is the logical conclusion to take.

You need to accept that this is something that people have already thought of and tried. You're not an engineer. Getting your undies in a wad because a bunch of people are giving you the same correct answer doesn't change the laws of thermodynamics.

But since you're such a super genius who knows it will work, why don't you build it and change the world?

I assume it's cost. You'll get pica amounts of charge. So it's not Worth it. When you can just cover every roof with solar. Enough wind turbines, water way turbines, bio plants and geothermal.

We don't actually need it.

I think that's the issue

In some sense this would be recuperating energy rather than generating new energy because we use energy to pump water to your toilet in the first place. So it’s not really a power source on its own (at least in most places), it’s more akin to regenerative braking where you can capture some of the energy you spent before.

If this was something that you were going to do it would not make sense to have small turbines in every toilet. Likely the energy used to manufacture every turbine and ship it would dwarf the energy output.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/91/

Not only that but maintenance would be a big concern! Millions of devices with moving parts subject to solid waste would be hard to keep running (and there’s a good chance it would plug your toilet more often). If this were a valuable source of power you would want to do it downstream and use a single larger turbine for harvesting energy from many houses. This would likely be more efficient as the larger turbine would likely have less friction proportionally, and there would only be one point for maintenance.

You can of course collect energy from lots of sources to generate small amounts of electricity but generators are expensive devices to produce and the amount of energy you would get out of these in the device’s lifetime would not offset that initial energy investment! That’s where things get really tricky.

Your initial idea of putting a wind turbine on a car is potentially something that can work, but with an important caveat! You won’t get more energy than you put into the system, and if the wind turbine is generating energy it’s taking it away from the car’s kinetic energy. It would basically be a form of regenerative braking where you would use drag to slow the car down but recuperate some of the kinetic energy from the car for use later. Regenerative braking on an electric car will be more efficient for this because wind turbines can’t capture energy as efficiently as an electric generator directly connected to the spinning axels, and the other factor that’s a huge win for normal regenerative braking in electric vehicles is that you don’t need many additional parts for the car. The wind turbine idea means you have to build a wind turbine, but you know what’s awesome? When you spin an electric motor it becomes an electrical generator instead, so you can just use the electric motor you already have for it!

Also for what it’s worth… The wind turbine for regenerative braking mind not be a thing, but in Formula 1 they have used fly wheels to store kinetic energy instead! So basically instead of spinning a fan, they have a big heavy wheel that they can use the momentum of the car to spin up (while slowing down the car at the same time), and this wheel can later be used to speed up the car again later.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_energy_recovery_system

With all of these regenerative systems it’s important to note that you don’t get more energy than you put in. There are losses and due to conservation of energy you’ll never be able to recover more energy.

That said wind power is also a thing and there’s all sorts of cool ways to take advantage of that… Like sail boats, and these cool things!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotor_ship

Its because machines are very inefficient in practice. You would lose more energy than you gain.

Maybe you should look into perpetual motion machines and why they don't work.