In release terms, you are not turning your store of energy into a mix of vapours, gases and particulates on every cycle and adding them to street level atmosphere, so that is an immediate bonus that batteries would seem to win on, especially in the built environments in which we live.
Getting and processing lithium and silicon are big messy industrial processes, but so is getting and processing oil and you need a lot more oil and it is much less abundant than lithium or silicon.
However oil already contains the stored energy you want, so until very recently it has been far less faff economically to distill oil, than trying to power cars by putting sunlight into metal using sand.
> In release terms, you are not turning your store of energy into a mix of vapours, gases and particulates on every cycle
This is sort of a point of contention at this point in time however. As you stated:
> putting sunlight into metal using sand.
This would be the longer term benefit of battery powered cars. Some countries have already made progress. And unless you're driving a Tesla and only charging it as there Supercharging stations, its not completely sunlight powering your wheels. It currently comes with the ecological impact of harvesting coal, burning it and etc.
In Sweden all personal transport by car takes 45 TWh per year, if everyone converted to electric cars/hybrids it would be 13 TWh. That's what the propaganda says anyway. Since most personal transports by car are so short it's in the sweet spot for electric cars.
Internal combustion engines are only about 20 percent efficient, and that ignores the energy spent pulling the dinosaur puree out of the ground. In comparison, electric engines are about 85-90 percent efficient.
Ignoring the differences between coal and oil (sure oil would be better if we had an unlimited amount) a single power plant will be more efficient and cleaner than hundreds of thousands of internal combustion engines.
Getting and processing lithium and silicon are big messy industrial processes, but so is getting and processing oil and you need a lot more oil and it is much less abundant than lithium or silicon.
However oil already contains the stored energy you want, so until very recently it has been far less faff economically to distill oil, than trying to power cars by putting sunlight into metal using sand.