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).
Range: how far can I drive and where can I recharge?
This is probably the biggest current drawback of electric vehicle technology. Not only are current electric vehicles limited by range, there is minimal current recharging infrastructure in place for high speed recharging of EV’s and batteries become prohibitively expensive when trying to increase the range of your vehicle. If you typically do a lot of long distance commuting, then an electric vehicle is perhaps not the best choice. EV’s are suited presently to the city as commuting distances are small and recharge points are more available.
The Tesla has a range of around 240 miles which is a significant distance, however comes at a fairly high price point around the $100,000 mark. Less expensive electric cars have a smaller range and top speed and are suited more to city driving. These are also more affordable and are much lighter vehicles. Many potential electric vehicle owners define this as their number one disadvantage of current electric car technology.
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%.