While mostly tongue-in-cheek, technicaly those things do happen, the energy you extract has to come from somewhere. Admittedly they extract a tiny,tiny portion of the total energy. A side point I was making was the greenie weenies want to ban internal combustion engines because they (in their opinion) are heating up the earth, yet they give no consideration to any potential adverse impact their favored forms of energy may have.
Ol Burb- you mentioned the on-board generator "like a turbine" pretty sure Jaguar had a concept vehicle with an actual turbine to drive the generator but had to switch to a piston version due to excess heat generation.
The biggest efficiency advantage electrics have is the ability to regenerate during braking. I think Porsche recently campaigned a 911 GT3 hybrid that used some sort of flywheel to store energy captured during braking.
Or you could do what I saw on a tv show about future cars - the guy was seriously suggesting running a car on water, saying he would use electricity generated by the hydrogen powered engine to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen, use the hydrogen for fuel and recapture the water vapor in the exhaust to have a never ending supply of water, and fuel, and energy. I haven't seen them in showrooms yet.
