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Nickdago: Batteries are what make the car efficient. It gets to run the gas engine at its most efficient speed/load, store that energy, then use it when necessary; and it gets to recover wasted energy through regenerative braking.
If you just hooked the gas engine generator to the electric motor with no batteries, it would be far less efficient than hooking the gas engine directly to the transmission. There's a lot of waste introduced when you make rotational energy, convert it to electricity, then just convert it back to rotational energy again.
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