I understand the argument, but I see two big reasons for why it’s not valid here. First, e-fuel production and infrastructure needs to be constructed as well. So your calculation needs to consider the entire cost/inefficiency of constructing the entire e-fuel econonomy in the first place.

Second, I can’t imagine existing cars outlasting humanities dependency on fossil fuels for electricity. Cars last what, 20-30 years? I bet humanity is not going to replace all fossil fuel electricity production with green one within the next 100 years. Like I said previously, as long as you burn fossils for electricity, producing e-fuels would only increase carbon emissions, not reduce them.

But yes, when it comes to efficient, it’s best to keep using existing things (barring exceptions where the original thing was too inefficient/dangerous/whatever). That includes not only cars, but also factories, etc. So technically combustion cars should probably still be built for a few decades, until existing factories are too outdated or have reached the end of their life. The same is true for fuel production though - use existing fuel production and don’t invest in e-fuels.

With all of that out of the way, as far as I’m concerned scrapping most of the existing passenger car, regardless of whether it’s combustion or electric, is a good thing. They and their infrastructure take up way too much space, energy and material, not to forget the noise, the smell, the danger, …

Just as preventing waste beats recycling, saving energy beats renewables. “E-fuels” are extremely inefficient and consume four to six times as much electricity as just using a battery would. While Switzerland is producing a lot of electricity from hydropower, they also depend on non-renewable nuclear power sources and its still unsolved dangerous waste problems. As long as countries depend heavily on fossils for electricity, it’s better to sell any potential excess clean electricity (not fossils, not nuclear) to them. Using electricity to generate fuels at a >80% efficiency loss instead of sending it to where it’s needed increases carbon emissions, instead of decreasing them.

Oh I have definitely played this game before! It’s a game with multiple factions and each faction collects different resources. There’s something like five resources and each faction needs 3 or so of them. Iirc these salamanders were sort of monk/magic/nature-ish or something along those lines. I think there were also humans (perhaps space marine style?) and some other species as factions.

edit:

Please no image search …

I found the name. Is describing everything I remember about the game to an AI allowed, or does that loosely fall into something like a “no image search” rule?