Electric cars are a mystery to most of us, vehicles that run without needing petrol or diesel to power them in some form does sound an awful lot like witchcraft. All the press attention isn’t making it any easier to figure out what exactly it is that makes these cars tick. You may know that you can plug them in to charge them at home or at selected charge stations and that to fully recharge them it can take an awfully long time. However, the question of how is it that electric cars have managed to side step internal combustion to give us forward momentum, is still a mystery.
In truth, electric cars are not as difficult to understand as it may first look. The engine in an electric car has been replaced by an electric motor. The electric motor is powered by something known as a controller that in turn gets its power from the rechargeable batteries that act as the fuel for the vehicle.
An electric vehicle has very simple set up really if it is a DC current design; the Controller or DC Controller is the brain which regulates how much power needs to be sent through to the motor from the batteries depending on how the accelerator is being applied. It is able to do this as it is connected to a pair of potentiometer that are attached to the accelerator, which send a signal to the controller to say how much power is needed.
In an AC design, there is a little bit more to the system as the Controller has to convert the DC current from the batteries and turn them into AC current by using six sets of power transistors it can take 300 volts DC and after reversing the polarity of the voltage sixty times a second, converts it into 240 volts AC.
If you’ve got an electric car you need insuring, visit our Electric Vehicle Insurance page and get a quote.
