How does an Electric Vehicle work?

The majority of cars on the street use an internal-combustion engine which converts from the heat of the burning gasoline into mechanical work. This process has major side-effects such as increased greenhouse gas emissions which leads to climate change, one of our biggest threats.

Of course there are major impacts in our economy due to this, meaning the government may have to intervene and impose certain taxes and introducing certain laws to regulated the amount of petrol being used up, however the key solution to this problem is substituting internal-combustion engined cars with electric cars, thus significantly reducing the total greenhouse gas emissions into our environment.

But how do they work? Well, We know that energy is conserved and we know that energy must therefore somehow be transferred from some sort of engine into mechanical work to cause the car to move.

The key concept here is magnetism. We all know opposite poles attract and like poles repel. Now try and imagine this, 2 magnetics are next to each other, one is fixed and the other is rotating. If the 2 poles nearest to each other share the same polarity, the magnet on the shaft will repel, that is until the magnetic on the poles of the 2 magnets are opposite therefore making them attract to each other.

Now this movement has managed to cause half a turn of the shaft which is good but won’t exactly drive you a distance of 40 km. This is where the concept of electromagnetism comes in. We know that a fixed magnet is rigid and doesn’t change, meaning north is always north and south is always south.

On an electromagnet however, allow poles to change positions, therefore when the magnet of the shaft is in line with the fixed magnet and their poles are opposing, the electromagnet in the shaft will quickly cause the poles to switch positions, therefore the 2 nearest poles of the magnets will be coherent, hence the shaft will rotate once again and the process repeats.

Now the difficulty here is figuring out how we can ensure that the electromagnet continues to spin, which is how the electric motors work. The answer is that we must use something called the inverter. The inverter module on the EV draws direct current from the car battery and through a clever combination of quick switches and capacitors, flips the direction of the electrons back and forth nearly 60 times a second, thereby rotating the wheels of the car.

Thanks for reading!!