I think that engineers should develop electric cars that not only can be powered through electricity, but can also be powered by the sun. These cars would definitely reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted into the air. My family used to have an electric car, but although it was environmentally friendly, we could not drive very far in it because it could only hold so much electricity. This disadvantage often leads people to owning and driving regular gas fueled cars. Solar powered cars would be able to travel as far as they could. During the day time, the car would run off of the sun in the sky. At night, the car could use saved up energy from the day to drive. These cars could help resolve the problem of CO2 car emissions.

I believe that your idea is something that can lead to a drop in the amount of CO2. Electric cars are great and my family happens to have two of them. I believe that electric cars are the best way to go as of right now because they do not release the CO2 that we are trying so hard to lower. The idea of having solar-powered electric cars could work because in the day they could run off of the sun and during the night they would be able to run off electricity. I feel that this idea of yours could be a great success one day to lower CO2. A regular car that runs on gasoline releases 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. If people would begin using electric cars it would be a huge change.

While electric cars are a good solution to _cars_ producing CO2, they still produce CO2 indirectly. This is because (unless your house is off the grid and completely energy self-sufficient) the energy to charge your electric car still needs to come from a power plant, which if that power plant is burning coal, could be worse for the environment. Additionally, the manufacturing processes to make the massive batteries required for electric cars to go long distances are very toxic (1). Ultimately though, electric cars are better for the environment (2), in part because some power used to charge an electric cars comes from wind turbines or solar farms or nuclear power plants, all of which produce far less CO2 than burning gasoline does.

Links

1: https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable … -batteries

2: https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/fi … df#page=13

I just did the math for how much CO2 an electric car (in this case a Nissan leaf) produces in a year in California (based on how much CO2 the California grid produces based on KWh), and it is around 1827 pounds of CO2 in a year, or just under one ton. I first found that California produces 525 pounds of CO2 per MWh (1), divided by 1000 to get .525 pounds of CO2 per KWh. I then found that the average car drives 12,000 miles in a year (2), and that a Nissan leaf uses 29 KWh per 100 miles (3), or .29 KWh per mile, multiplied the number of miles a car drives in a year by how much power each mile costs to get 3480 KWh of power for a Nissan leaf to drive in a year, then multiplied the amount of CO2 produced by the grid per KWh by the amount of  KWh a Leaf uses in one year to get the result of just under one ton of CO2 in a year.
So, in conclusion, electric cars are more than four times better for the environment than gasoline cars (at least based on Nissan Leafs in California in 2016 not taking into account manufacturing costs).

Links

1: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/state /california/

2: https://www.immihelp.com/newcomer/used- … -tips.html

3: https://www.edmunds.com/fuel-economy/th … c-car.html