If you’re old enough, you may remember your grandparents talking about electric cars. But the electric powered cars people are talking about nowadays are nothing like those electric vehicles from the early 1900s.
When you hear someone talking about hybrid cars, they are actually talking about a car that runs on a combination of gas and electricity (in technological terms, cars with gasoline-electric powertrains).
10 years ago electric and hybrid cars would make people giggle at their very mention. Yet these prototypes were nothing short of the human brilliance paving the way for what is soon to become the future of road transport. Electric vehicles are not a fashion trend, they represent the next revolution in automobile technology. It’s not so hard to see why there is such a hype about electric cars. Here are some of the points:
Electric motors by design are much more efficient than Internal Combustion Engines (ICE). They achieve efficiencies of well over 90% compared to an average of 20% for ICE. This translates into greater economical incentive since electric motors average 6Km/Kwh (Kilometer per Kilowatt-hour of energy) compared to 2.5Km/Kwh for ICE running on petrol. Efficiency with ICE is a big problem as there is not much scope for improvement. You see, in physics the laws of thermodynamics come into play theoretically limiting the efficiency of these designs to about 40%.
Over the past few years, you have probably heard a lot of discussion about electric cars. The most common of the latest electric cars are the gas-electric hybrids that boast fuel efficiency of 45 mpg and higher. These hybrids feature the benefits that consumers indicated to manufacturers that they wanted. These include high gas mileage, reduced emissions, quietness, and long range that utilizes an existing system of fuel distribution.
There are other options for electric cars, each having advantages and disadvantages. What most would consider a true electric car would carry no engine utilizing fossil fuel. Instead, it would carry a bank of batteries and rely on recharging of the batteries while parked and/or utilize solar or another alternate source of electricity.