How Does an Electric Car Work?

Electric cars look very different under the hood than a gasoline-powered car. For one thing, there is a lot less tubing. For another, if you look underneath the hood of an electric car, one of the first things you will probably notice is the controller, which takes energy from the battery and distributes it to the motor in controlled packets.

And that's pretty much it in a nutshell. Instead of a gas tank, the electric car keeps its fuel in a battery and relies on the controller, not the distributor, to get that fuel to the motor and make it go. Of course, there are a lot of complex goings-on in the motor that make that transfer possible, but we don't need to talk about those here.

You control the amount of fuel that the electric motor gets, thereby controlling the speed of the car, with a pedal, just as you would with a gasoline-powered vehicle. The controller reads the amount of pressure that you are giving the pedal and translates that into an amount of electricity. If the controller was simply an "off" and "on" switch, that simply knew how to either grab electricity or not grab electricity, then you would have to pump the pedal constantly. You would increase speed by pumping the pedal more vigorously. You would have one very developed calf muscle.

Because you can't simply plug your car into an outlet and go, as you can with an electric mixer, for instance, you have to actually recharge your electric car, much as you recharge your cell phone. One down side of having an electric car is the time it takes to charge, which is anywhere from 4-10 hours, depending on what type of charging system you use. That can make it very inconvenient if you suddenly have to drive your cat to the emergency room in the middle of the night.