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 term "potential energy" was introduced by the 19th-century Scottish engineer and physicist William Rankine, although it has links to Greek philosopher Aristotle's concept of potentiality. Potential energy is associated with forces that act on a body in a way that the total work done by these forces on the body depends only on the initial and final positions of the body in space. These forces, that are called "conservative forces", can be represented at every point in space by vectors expressed as gradients of a certain scalar function called "potential". Since the work of potential forces acting on a body