Compressed air car The principal disadvantages are the steps of energy conversion and transmission, because each inherently has loss. For combustion engine cars, the energy is lost when chemical energy in fossil fuels is converted by the engine to mechanical energy. For electric cars, a power plant's electricity (from whatever source) is transmitted to the car's batteries, which then transmits the electricity to the car's motor, which converts it to mechanical energy. For compressed-air cars, the power plant's electricity is transmitted to a compressor, which mechanically compresses the air into the car's tank. The car's engine then converts the compressed air to mechanical
Potential energy to the gravitational potential energy, thus The more formal definition is that potential energy is the energy difference between the energy of an object in a given position and its energy at a reference position. Potential energy is closely linked with forces. If the work done by a force on a body that moves from "A" to "B" does not depend on the path between these points (if the work is done by a conservative force), then the work of this force measured from "A" assigns a scalar value to every other point in space and defines a scalar potential