Watch What 20 Minutes of Pedal-Charging Do to a Tesla Model X's Range

One of the appeals of owning an electric vehicle is that one day you'll be able to produce all the necessary juice to charge up its batteries within your own household.

People usually think of wind or solar power whenever they dream about this quasi-complete transportation independence, but things aren't really there at the moment. Solar power is advancing (some would say 'rapidly', others wouldn't) and it can already cover a large chunk of a household's needs, but we haven't reached that point where you can safely cut yourself from the grid and never look back.

Wind is also doing well, but not at this lower, individual level. The cost of an effective wind turbine is highly prohibitive and, from a financial point of view, doesn't make for a good investment. At the same time, it's all too weather-dependent - even more so than solar power since panels would still produce power even if the sun isn't shining at Arizona levels, but you won't get anything out of a turbine if the air around it is completely stagnant. Unless, of course, you turn it yourself.

Speaking of which, a Finnish television show decided to test just how efficient humans are at charging an electric vehicle. To do it they came up with a special contraption that connected nine stationary bicycles to a charger connected to a Tesla Model X parked on the set.

They even brought nine professional cyclists to give this new charging method its best possible chances of success, but the result was predictably disappointing. Over the course of 20 minutes, all the sweat of the nine athletes was converted to just two kilometers (1.6 miles) of extra range for the electric SUV.

That's one kilometer per ten minutes per nine cyclists. To fill up the Model X's battery entirely, assuming it had a 100 kWh unit, they would have had to keep at it for almost 80 hours. I don't know about you, but that sounds like a lot of hours. And possibly a lot of cyclists dead from exhaustion. Well, here's an idea for another TV show.