Electric cars

by Chris Woodford. Last updated: April 2, 2024.

Cough, splutter, chug, choke—is the way cars have been till now. Humm, whirr, whiz, glide—is the way they'll probably be tomorrow. Sooner or later, whether it's in a couple of decades or a distant century, oil-based fuels will be far too precious to squander on the world's dwindling fleet of gas-powered cars. That's when a confident majority of electric car drivers will peer back over the shoulder of history to a time—the twentieth century—when automotive technology took a drastic wrong turn.

Electric cars use older technology than gasoline cars and, in their late-19th-century infancy, looked set to rule the world. The first electric car was built in 1834 and by 1900 some 38 percent of all cars were electric. [1] But oil was cheap and abundant and, in many ways, offered a better method of powering fast cars over long distances. Henry Ford's mass-production of affordable gas-powered cars soon put paid to electric dreams. Fortunately, as people finally woke up to the environmental and economic drawbacks of petroleum in the late 20th century, technology turned full circle and cars powered by the zap of electricity started to return to our streets. But is it really inevitable that all cars will go electric? How long will it take? Before we can consider that question, it helps to ask something much more fundamental: how exactly do electric cars work? What's so good about them anyway—and what are the drawbacks? Can you really go to work powered by a few buzzing electrons? Let's take a closer look!

Photo: Has the future finally arrived? We're well used to seeing electric cars parked up and charging at stations like this 100 percent renewable Beam solar charger. Picture by Jacqueline Hill courtesy of US Army and DVIDS.

What is an electric car?

All cars—gas, electric, hydrogen, or using any other "fuel"—are essentially energy converters: they turn potential (stored) energy into kinetic (movement) energy. In a conventional car, the energy is stored in chemical form, locked inside the gas you've pumped in your tank; you release it through a chemical reaction happening inside the engine in which the hydrocarbon molecules in gasoline burn with oxygen in the air to release heat, which pushes the pistons that turn the wheels (this all happens inside the engine's cylinders, so we call it internal combustion). Electric cars also use stored chemical energy, though they release it electrochemically, without any kind of combustion, as electrons ping from their slowly discharging batteries; there's no burning of fuel, no air pollution spewing from the tailpipe, and no obvious emissions of any kind are produced by the car itself.

Types of electric cars

Electric cars broadly come in two main varieties: battery electric (sometimes called BEV, or battery electric vehicles), with just an electric motor for power; or hybrid, with both an electric motor and a conventional gasoline engine. This article is mostly about battery electric cars, though we'll briefly look at hybrid cars in the box below. Cars powered by fuel cells are also electric, though they use tanks of hydrogen to generate electricity and power an electric motor instead of banks of batteries. You can read more about them in our separate article on fuel cell cars.

Photo: Many people's ideas of electric cars are still based on vehicles like the famous experimental GM Sunraycer, which looks amazingly futuristic—but is now over 30 years old. The whole of the back section (everything to the right of the white cockpit) is covered in thousands of silicon and gallium arsenide solar cells, while the driver sits in the pod at the front. Sunraycer won the 2000-mile World Solar Challenge race in the late 1980s. Picture by Warren Gretz courtesy of US Department of Energy/National Renewable Energy Laboratory (DoE/NREL). Image ref 104535.

Key parts of an electric car

Gas-powered cars and electric ones have a great deal in common and the key differences are the stored energy they use (gasoline versus electricity), the machine they use to convert it into kinetic energy (an engine or an electric motor), and the way the stored energy powers that machine (through a gearbox and transmission, in the case of an ordinary car, but often more directly in an electric car). Let's examine the two key components of electric cars—the motor and the batteries—in a bit more detail and compare them with what we have in a conventional car.

Photo: It's not rocket science—or is it? NASA had to use electric car technology to drive its Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle (sometimes called the Moon Rover) because there's no air on the Moon to power an internal combustion engine. The Lunar Rover was driven by four electric motors, one for each wheel, all powered by two 36-volt batteries. It's pictured here in 1972, during the Apollo 17 mission, being driven by astronaut Gene Cernan. Read more about the technology inside the Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle. Picture courtesy of NASA on the Commons.

Electric motor

Motors are quite different from gasoline engines—and not just in the fuel they burn. An engine needs to spin round relatively quickly to work efficiently (usually thousands of times a minute), but a car's wheels never go that fast. The power an engine can produce at any given moment may be very different from what the driver needs. For example, if you're moving off from a cold start, or a traffic signal, you need the engine to produce a great deal of force (torque as it's called) at a relatively low speed, whereas if you're driving steadily on a speedy highway, you'll need the opposite: more speed and less torque.

Photo: The main power unit from a Nissan Leaf electric car has three separate parts: a charging unit (red, top), which takes AC from an outside power supply ("EVSE") to charge the DC battery; an inverter (yellow, middle), which turns DC battery power into AC to drive the motor; and the electric motor itself (blue, bottom). Picture by Dennis Schroeder courtesy of US Department of Energy/National Renewable Energy Laboratory (DoE/NREL). Image ref 41079.

Instant torque

There's not much you can do to control the output from a car engine because it's a chemical machine, driven by an essentially simple chemical reaction between fuel and oxygen that produces useful mechanical power. In that respect, an internal combustion engine is just like the external combustion engine you'll find on something like a steam engine. If you want more power, you need to burn more fuel more quickly—a basic law of physics called the law of conservation of energy tells us that—which is why operating a car's accelerator is informally called "stepping on the gas": burning gas faster makes more power and ultimately delivers more speed. Apart from the accelerator (supplying more or less fuel), the other two key controls of a conventional car engine are the gears (transforming the power coming from the engine so the wheels turn quickly with low force or slowly with high force) and the clutch (briefly engaging or disengaging the engine's power from the gearbox altogether). And we need the gears and the clutch because of basic limitations in how an engine works—as a machine that enjoys spinning around thousands of times a minute, however fast you're driving (the engine keeps turning, burning fuel and costing money, even if you're stopped at a traffic signal).

The motor in an electric car is very different: up to a point, it has no "preference" whether it spins fast or slow—it's pretty good at delivering the same torque at any moderate speed.

Artwork: A (very!) rough indication of how torque varies with speed (engine rpm) for electric motors and gasoline engines of comparable power. Electric motors produce maximum torque right from the off, whereas gasoline engines need to pick up quite a bit of speed to deliver maximum torque.

Transmission

In theory, an electric motor can drive a full-sized electric car just as simply as a toy one, without the clumsy old gearbox and transmission you'd use in a conventional gasoline-engined car. In practice, electric cars are more complex. Toys are small and go slow, while real cars are much bigger and go faster. When a real car corners, its two outside wheels are traveling around a curve of bigger radius than its two inside wheels but in exactly the same time, which means they have to spin slightly faster. (The same is true of toy cars, but the effect is too small to notice.) That's why real cars need complex transmissions with speed-adjusting gears called differentials that allow one pair of wheels to go at a slightly different speed—faster on the outside of a curve, slower on the inside—than the other.

The same happens in an electric car when it goes around a corner, and that rules out any kind of simple transmission (for example, a single electric motor driving the two back wheels from a common axle). One solution is to have a front-located electric motor driving the same kind of transmission as an ordinary gasoline car, using a driveshaft (propeller shaft) and differential in the usual way. Another is to do away with the driveshaft and have a motor, gearbox, and differential unit between two of the wheels (either front or rear) and driving them both. A third option is to have two front or rear motors (with or without gearboxes), each driving one wheel independently. The final option is to use two or four hub motors (in-wheel motors), which are motors built into the wheels themselves. That raises a different technical issue: how to build a motor that's lightweight, compact, and still powerful enough to drive a car (although if there are four hub motors, you need to generate only a quarter of the total power with each one).

Artwork: Transmissions: How does power get from the motor to the wheels? Four example arrangements of the electric motor (green), gearbox (orange), differential (scarlet), driveshafts (light blue), and hub motors (red) in an electric car. 1) In this arrangement, the electric motor powers the car much like a traditional engine through a gearbox and driveshaft. 2) A central motor powers both wheels through one or two gearboxes. 3) Two separate motors power two wheels through separate gearboxes. 4) Hub motors power two (or sometimes all four) wheels with no other gearboxes, driveshafts, or other transmission parts.

Batteries

Every car is an electric car inasmuch it uses a battery to get the engine spinning when you first start off. Historically, cars were the pioneers of rechargeable batteries. Long before we had laptops and cellphones, windup torches and all the rest, back when most of us routinely used batteries one minute and threw them away the next, cars were demonstrating the possibility of using batteries over and over again. The only trouble was, car engines used big and heavy lead-acid batteries that weren't good enough to power vehicles at high speeds, over long distances, for long periods of time.

Photo: In a Tesla, the lithium-ion batteries are stowed in this compartment at the rear. Photo by courtesy of Steve Jurvetson, published on Flickr in 2007 under a Creative Commons licence.

Today's electric cars mostly use lithium-ion batteries, exactly the same technology you'll find in your laptop or cellphone. They're relatively light, fairly good at storing useful amounts of power for their weight, last several years and hundreds of charges, and perform reasonably well at the varied range of temperatures most car drivers routinely encounter round the world (though not always that well in the extremes you can find even in hotter and colder US states). That doesn't mean they're perfect. The main problem with car batteries is that they still can't carry as much energy as gasoline per unit of mass; in other words, they have a lower energy density. Lithium-ion batteries are likely to remain the popular choice for electric cars for the foreseeable future, though alternatives such as nickel metal hydride (NiMH), which are safer and cheaper, and other lithium-based technologies (including lithium-nickel-manganese-cobalt, lithium-phosphate, lithium-manganese, and lithium-cobalt) are also waiting in the wings. Supercapacitors (also called ultracapacitors) are another promising alternative. A bit like a cross between batteries and capacitors, they offer much faster charging times.

Photo: An electric Smart car boasting that it's powered by lithium batteries. Picture by Kim Shiflett courtesy of NASA.

Advantages and disadvantages of electric cars

What's good?

Emissions

At first sight, electric cars are completely green cars: sometimes they're even referred to as ZEVs (zero-emission vehicles)—and the official fueleconomy.gov website actually quotes zero grams of CO₂ emissions per mile for most electric cars. [2]

Now while it's true that the car itself makes no tailpipe pollution and produces no CO₂ emissions in the place where you drive it, it's also misleading: unless your electricity comes from a wind turbine or a solar panel, some emissions are still produced in the process of electricity generation in a distant power plant somewhere. (It's also important to note that electric cars can produce significant amounts of particulate—dust and dirt—pollution from brake and tire wear and erosion of the road surface. That's why Professor Frank Kelly, one of Britain's leading experts on the health effects of dirty air, says electric cars will not tackle air pollution.) [3]

Even with that qualification, electric cars are no worse than the greenest fossil fueled cars—and that comparison will only get more favorable as electricity generation becomes greener; an electric car powered by green electricity is going to win on emissions by a very long way. (You can read more detailed versions of this argument in Why electric cars are only as clean as their power supply, a Guardian article from a few years ago, and The 'electric cars aren't green' myth debunked from Shrink that Footprint.)

Efficiency

Electric cars are considerably more efficient than gasoline cars because electric motors are inherently more efficient (about 80 percent) than internal combustion engines (a mere 30 percent for the engine alone, much less for an entire gas-powered vehicle), which waste a high proportion of the fuel they burn as useless heat. [7]

How do the figures work out in practice? The 2024 MINI Cooper SE 2-door hardtop electric (list price around $30,900) manages an average (city and highway combined) 31 kWh (kilowatt hours) per 100 miles (equivalent to 110 mpg) for an annual fuel cost of $700 per year, where a 2024 gasoline version of the same car (list price $25,800) comes in at just 32 mpg for an annual fuel cost of $2000 per year. [4] Tesla claim an even bigger difference: an annual 30,000-mile running cost for a Tesla Model S of $1,048 (at $0.12 per kWh) compared to a typical gas car's $5,318 (based on $3.90 per gallon of fuel and 2015 figures).

Hybrid cars achieve their higher efficiency and fuel economy largely by switching from gasoline power to electricity whenever it's favorable, such as sitting still in heavy traffic. Where a typical car (a four-cylinder, 2.0-liter Ford Fusion) driven by gasoline might achieve around 25mpg, its equivalent hybrid manages a far more impressive 41 mpg (combined)—over 50 percent better, while the plug-in hybrid version achieves the equivalent of 103mpg. You can see how hybrids (yellow) line up between electric (green) and gasoline cars (red) in the chart below. [5]

Chart: How much better are electric cars? This chart compares mpge (mpg equivalent) or mpg ratings for 18 cars with 2023/2024 specifications: six electrics (green), six hybrids (yellow), and six gasoline cars (red). Figures are quoted from fueleconomy.gov.

It's not just the engine that makes an electric car more efficient. With regenerative brakes, you're not throwing energy away every time you stop and stop: the car's electric motor becomes a generator so that when the brakes are engaged, the car slows down as your kinetic energy turns to electricity that recharges the battery.

David MacKay sums it all up neatly in his book Sustainable Energy Without Hot Air: "Electric vehicles can deliver transport at an energy cost of roughly 15 kilowatt hours (kWh) per 100km. That's five times better than our baseline fossil-car, and significantly better than any hybrid cars. Hurray!" According to fueleconomy.gov, his figure is about half the published energy cost of a MINI or Nissan Leaf; even so, the new EVs are still well ahead of the old fossils.

Performance

Even in performance, electric cars sometimes outclass gasoline ones. As we've already seen, electric motors can produce high torque even at low speeds, which means they can accelerate from a standstill more quickly than gasoline cars that don't produce their peak torque until they reach relatively high engine speeds. They're also quieter and smoother. As Tesla have demonstrated, there's no reason whatsoever why electric motors and batteries—once thought of as dull, worthy, and rather plodding— can't power racy, exciting sports cars. A Tesla Model S can accelerate from 0–60mph (100km/h) in just 3.9 seconds, comparable to a high-performance gasoline-powered BMW M5 (and in at least one test, by Motortrend magazine, rather better).

Photo: Zap! Cars like this Tesla Roadster Sport changed popular perception of electric power—from dull and worthy to racy and exciting. Introduced in 2010, it could accelerate from 0–60mph (100km/h) in 3.7 seconds! Picture by Tyler Main courtesy of US Marine Corps and and DVIDS.

Size is no obstacle for electric power either. Diesel-electric trains (in which diesel engines power electric motors that provide the traction) have been around for years. In Belarus, giant truck manufacturer BelAZ has been spent the last decade or so developing a series of vast diesel-electric mining trucks, in which four giant AC motors are powered by two 16-cylinder diesel engines. These are among the world's biggest haul trucks. If you can use electric power for trucks like this, you can probably use it for anything!

Maintenance

Maintenance is also less of a chore, because electric cars are generally simpler than gasoline ones. According to a report by the Institute of Automobile Economics, electric vehicles cost about a third less to maintain than equivalent gas or diesel cars. A team from Argonne National Laboratory found an even bigger difference: electric cars cost 40 percent less to maintain. Why? An electric motor is an inherently simpler bit of kit than a gasoline engine with far fewer moving parts to wear out; if it uses no transmission or gearbox, that makes the entire car simpler still. Even the brakes last longer, since regenerative braking means you need to use the conventional (frictional) brake pads much less than in an ordinary car. On the other hand, some of the technology used in electric cars is relatively untested, which means it could be more prone to early failure even if it is, paradoxically, simpler and theoretically more reliable in the long run.

What's bad?

Batteries

Electric motors and batteries are the two main points of difference between conventional and electric cars. Where motors are well understood and highly reliable, giant battery packs remain the Achilles heel of electric cars. Despite its environmental and economic drawbacks, kilo for kilo, a tank of gasoline can carry far more energy than a bunch of batteries (see chart below)—and that will remain the case for the foreseeable future. You can completely refuel a gas-powered car in a couple of minutes (as long as it takes to fill up your tank) and drive several hundred kilometers on the energy you've pumped in without stopping. But electric cars can take anything from half-an-hour to a whole night to recharge ("fill up") and, even then, probably won't get you further than a few hundred kilometers before the batteries run flat.

Where a gas tank is a relatively compact thing that sits neatly out of sight, the batteries in an electric car are expensive, bulky, heavy, and take up room you might use for other things. Having said that, batteries have improved dramatically over the last few years. Back in 2013, the MIT technology Review reported that batteries represented about a quarter of the cost of a Tesla Model S, which still worked out at around $20,000. In 2020, Forbes estimated that the cost of a Tesla battery fell from about 19 percent of the total vehicle cost in 2016 to around 15 percent in 2019.

Chart: Why we still drive gasoline cars—in a nutshell. Kilo for kilo, gasoline can carry far more energy than batteries. Hydrogen is a much better energy carrier, but there are significant problems in making and storing it. Coal scores highly too, but it's dirty and impractical: steam cars disappeared long ago!

Everyone who owns a cellphone or a laptop powered by lithium-ion technology will be fully aware that rechargeable batteries don't last more than a few years (even less if you treat them badly)—and they can fail with little or no warning. In an electric car, there are banks of batteries, not just one or two cells, so you're less at the mercy of a sudden failure and more likely to find a gradual deterioration in range with the same charging time. Since batteries are so expensive and remain the biggest questionmark in electric cars, manufacturers have done their best to reassure buyers with warranties of around 8–10 years (or 100,000–125,000 miles). Research by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) suggests current batteries could be made to last 15 years and a 2013 meeting of the American Chemical Society heard that batteries might well last 20 years, which is probably the maximum lifetime of most cars. If that sounds impressive and reassuring, bear in mind that many of us buy our cars secondhand (already several years old) and it's far from uncommon to drive around in a car that's 10 years old or even more. Another critical factor is that battery performance and health depends on temperature: using electric vehicles in very hot or cold climates can affect their battery life (and range).

The only sensible answer about batteries comes from Jeff Cobb of HybridCars.com, whose excellent article How Long Will An Electric Car's Battery Last? reviewed all the evidence and concluded "Ultimately it is too soon to tell."

Photo: Batteries have always been the stumbling block in making successful electric cars because they carry energy less effectively than gasoline. Here, gigantic nickel-zinc batteries are being loaded inside a prototype electric car by NASA engineers in 1977. Picture courtesy of NASA Glenn Research Center (NASA-GRC) and Internet Archive.

Convenience

The higher energy density of gasoline and its relative cheapness are two key reasons why the world still prefers dirty, polluting gas-powered SUVs over clean, green eco machines like the Toyota Prius and the Nissan Leaf. But the sheer convenience of the "oil economy" is important too. Wherever you live, you're never that far from a gas station. Figures from the US Census Bureau (quoted by Statista) reveal that there are some 115,000 gas stations across the United States. By comparison, according to the Alternative Fuels Data Center, as of 2024, there are now 177,560 alternative fueling "stations" of all kinds (of which 62,720 are actual electric-charging stations). That sounds impressive, but about half of them are in just seven states—and over a quarter are in California alone.

Chart: There's been a huge growth in alternative fueling stations of all kinds in the United States. However, it's important to drill down into this data by state. As of 2024, 26% are in California, 5.5% are in New York, another 5.5% are in Texas, 4% are in Massachusetts, and 9% are in Washington, George, and Colorado (about 3% in each). So half of all the stations are in just seven states. Vast Alaska has the fewest stations (just 120). Please note that these figures include not just electric stations, but also biodiesel pumps, CNG, renewable diesel, and everything else. Source: Alternative Fuels Data Center, 2024 and historic data.

Having said that, range is nowhere near as big an issue for electric cars as critics like to claim: the US Department of Energy points out that most people's daily commute involves a round-trip of less than 30 miles. Technically, the sky is the limit for electric cars: with help from onboard solar panels, future electric cars could go many times further than today's vehicles, which typically now manage 500km (300 miles) or more on a single charge.

Photo: Theoretically, you can recharge an electric car anywhere, even at home. But what if you work away, travel a lot, or live in a high-rise apartment? Unfortunately, the world is still not geared up for mass use of electric cars and lack of charging points remains an issue. Picture courtesy of NASA.

Status quo

While fuel and running costs are lower for electric cars, the initial purchase price is often considerably higher, but not always as much as you might think. A 2020 Ford Fusion plug-in hybrid cost around $37,000, whereas a comparable gasoline model came in at about $28,000. By contrast, a 2021 Toyota RAV4 plug-in hybrid cost around $28,900–$37,430 where the comparable gasoline model was about $26,350–$36,280. In 2024, a two-door MINI Cooper hard-top electric clocked in at $30,900, compared to $25,800 for a similar gasoline model. [6]

Concerns about things like battery life also make it harder for people to take the plunge. Sticking with what you know is always easier than taking an expensive risk. Some countries offer tax breaks for electric cars, but you still have to face that higher purchase price to begin with.

What does the future hold?

Green-thinking environmentalists tend to see this issue in black-and-white: if cars have a future at all (they would prefer more public transportation and greater use of local goods to reduce the need for transportation altogether), it must be an electric one. Even setting aside concerns about emissions, electric cars are certain to become more affordable and economic as oil supplies dwindle. The bigger the demand for electric cars, the more economics of scale will kick in. The more electric cars there are, the better the infrastructure will be, the bigger the choice of models, and the greater the likelihood of hardened petrol heads switching allegiance to the clean and green. It all sounds so very positive, so very inevitable.

"Skyrocketing" growth?

It's easy to fall for strident statistics celebrating the "astonishing" growth in electric cars (so many hundred percent this year, so many hundred percent next) until you remember that there are still very few electric cars around: 100 percent growth from not very much is not much more.

Back in October 2014, an article in Forbes spoke of "skyrocketing" growth in electric cars in the (US) states of California, Georgia, Washington, Michigan, and Texas. In Texas for example, it cited a 128 percent growth in electric cars in just 12 months, which sounds extremely impressive until you look at the actual numbers: there were 6533 electric cars at the time of writing compared to 2862 the year before, but that was less than 1/1000 of the total number of cars registered in Texas at the time (7.7 million).

Where do things stand now? US Energy Information Administration(EIA) [PDF] figures show that battery electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles accounted for just 1.2 percent of all light-duty vehicles (cars and light trucks) in the United States in 2022. Even in California, which leads the States in EV adoption, the proportion of electric cars isn't much better (3.3 percent of all light-duty vehicles, with electrics accounting for just 5.5 percent of new car sales in 2019 (according to the LA Times). According to the EIA's market analysis of electric vehicles in May 2018, the reasons for the slow growth in electric cars include relatively low gas prices, improved economy of conventional engines, and the continued barrier to entry for electric vehicles (the initial purchase price is still much higher).

Chart: Putting electric vehicles in perspective—using the UK as an example. Yes, they're slowly gaining market share—but "slowly" is the word. Only the green, orange, and yellow areas count as electric; red and blue are fossil-fueled cars. Source: GB total vehicle figures taken from VEH1103: Licensed vehicles at the end of the quarter by body type and fuel type: Great Britain and United Kingdom, UK Department for Transport, April 2024.

People have been predicting the demise of the internal combustion engine, caused by our surpassing "peak oil" production, for over half a century (especially since the energy crisis of the early 1970s)—and we're still surrounded by a billion gas guzzlers. Improvements in petroleum prospecting and recovery and better car design and efficiency have extended the life of this old technology far beyond what many people thought possible. Is there any reason why, 40 years on, in the middle of the 21st century, we're not going to find ourselves in exactly the same position: a few more electric cars on the roads but the majority of us still rattling round in gas-powered crates? According to 2015 predictions by the US Energy Information Administration, even by 2040, around 46 percent of cars will still be using gasoline only, while another 43 percent will be micro hybrid or flex fuel. A mere 2 percent will be fully electric or plug-in hybrids, 5 percent will be full hybrids, and 4 percent will be diesel.

Quite a lot has changed since then. That year (2015) brought the Volkswagen emissions scandal—and a huge backlash against diesel. Since then, various manufacturers (including Volvo, GM, and Ford) and governments have announced dates by which they intend to stop sales of gasoline vehicles—typically around 2030–2035. [8] Does that mean we're all signed up to a green-electric transport revolution? Not a bit of it. A telling September 2021 analysis by Vaclav Smil revealed that "growth in SUV use could more than offset carbon savings from electric vehicles." In other words, we still don't get it. However rational the arguments in favor of electric cars, and however much environmentalists would like things to be otherwise, the world has a huge attachment to dirty gasoline technology—and that's unlikely to change anytime soon.

A brief history of electric cars

Electric cars have always been radically modern; from Woody Allen's Sleeper to the 1.21 gigawatt-flux capacitor that powered Marty McFly's DeLorean Time Machine in Back to the Future, they're the very stuff of science fiction. Yet they're science fact too: Apollo astronauts, you might remember, were bouncing round the Moon in the battery powered Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) about 45 years ago. No-one knows if electric cars will ever play a dominant role in the future, but they've certainly had an interesting past. Here's a whistle-stop tour of electric car history... so far. I've not covered every invention and inventor; just a few key milestones to give you a flavor!

• 1800: Italian Alessandro Volta invents the battery (a primitive stack of zinc and silver discs separated by cardboard soaked in saltwater).
• 1821: English chemist Michael Faraday shows how electricity and magnetism can work together to make a force—the basic scientific principle of the electric motor.
• 1829: American electricity pioneer Joseph Henry develops a practical motor, though it's still far from a viable machine.
• 1834: Thomas Davenport develops a viable electric motor and goes on to develop the first battery-powered electric car running on a track. Unlike in modern electric cars, the batteries are not rechargeable.
• 1837: Robert Davidson of Scotland develops a battery powered car and later (in 1842) an electric train that whizzes along the Edinburgh to Glasgow Railway at a breathtaking 6km/h (4mph).
• 1859: Frenchman Gaston Planté invents the lead-acid battery, made from nine cells connected in parallel, and demonstrates it to the French Academy of Sciences the following year.
• 1859: Electricity pioneer and prolific US inventor Thomas Edison develops an electric car.
• 1881: Siemens constructs the first permanent electric railroad in Lichterfelde, Germany. Its four-wheel locomotive is powered by a 150-volt dynamo.
• 1885: Leo Daft uses an electric motor to power a commuter train to 50km/h (30mph) in New York City.
• 1890: William Morrison develops the first successful American electric car. It can manage a respectable 23km/h (14mph). Power comes from a 4hp motor and 24 battery cells under the seats.

  

  Photo: William Morrison's electric wagon. Artwork from Scientific American, January 9, 1892, p.18.

• 1900: German Ferdinand Porsche develops the world's first hybrid, hub-motor electric car (the Lohner-Porsche).
• 1908: Henry Ford gives his wife Clara a Detroit Electric car as a present after she complains she couldn't start a gasoline car with a hand crank. Later, he buys another one for his friend Thomas Edison as a Christmas present.
• 1910s–1960s: Ironically, despite Ford's enthusiasm, his development of cheap, mass-produced gasoline cars pushes electric car technology to one side.
• 1940s–1970s: Electric vehicles are used for little more than powering delivery vehicles, such as "milk floats" (widely used to deliver dairy products door-to-door in the UK before supermarkets take over).

  

  Photo: A typical electric "milk float". The lead-acid batteries are the black boxes stowed in front of the wheels, underneath the main cargo platform. This one is a Wales and Edwards Rangemaster, very popular in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.

• 1971: Apollo 15 astronauts David Scott and James Irwin drive the electric Lunar Roving Vehicle on the Moon for the first time.
• 1976: US Congress passes the Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Research, Development, and Demonstration Act to encourage the production of electric cars.
• 1990: The California Air Resources Board spurs the development of electric cars with its zero-emission vehicle program.
• 1996: General Motors begins leasing its pioneering and futuristic looking EV1. Later, the cars are controversially taken back by GM and crushed.
• 1997: Toyota launches the Prius in Japan—and it soon becomes the world's best-selling hybrid.
• 2008: The first Tesla Roadster electric car is shipped to customers.
• 2013: Toyota announces it has sold over 5 million hybrids worldwide, including 2 million in the United States alone.
• 2017: European countries, including France and Britain, announce they will ban the sale of new gasoline and diesel cars by 2040. Volvo reveals it will phase out internal combustion engines much sooner, announcing a plan to offer only hybrids or electric cars from 2019.

Find out more

On this site

• Electric bicycles
• Fuel cells
• Hub motors
• Regenerative brakes

Books

• The Electric Vehicle Revolution: The Past, Present, and Future of EVs by Kevin A. Wilson. Motorbooks, 2023. A colorful tour through the long history of electric cars. Packed with photos, illustrations, and charts, it's an easy read and a great place to start.
• The Great Race: The Global Quest for the Car of the Future by Levi Tillemann. Simon & Schuster, 2016. A wide-ranging account of the auto industry's battles over clean, green cars.
• Build Your Own Electric Vehicle (Third Edition) by Seth Leitman and Bob Brant. McGraw Hill Professional, 2013.
• Electric Vehicle Technology Explained (Second Edition) by James Larminie and John Lowry. John Wiley & Sons, 2012.
• Plug-in Hybrids: The Cars that will Recharge America by Sherry Boschert. New Society Publishers, 2006.
• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Hybrid and Alternative Fuel Vehicles by Jack R. Nerad. Alpha Books, 2007.

Articles

Check out the latest electric vehicle articles from The New York Times, The Guardian, and Wired.

Here are some older articles from the archives:

• Nissan to cut cost of making electric cars by nearly a third by 2030 by Jack Simpson, The Guardian. March 25, 2024. How the Japanese are fighting it out with Chinese rivals like BYD and Li Auto.
• How China Built BYD, Its Tesla Killer by Keith Bradsher, The New York Times. February 12, 2024. The story of China's electric-vehicle giant.
• Electric vehicles close to 'tipping point' of mass adoption by Damian Carrington, The Guardian. January 22, 2021. Huge increases in ownership and growing commitments from manufacturers are pushing electric cars ever closer to mass adoption.
• Electric cars produce less CO2 than petrol vehicles, study confirms by Fiona Harvey, The Guardian. March 23, 2020. Even if they get their electricity from fossil fuels, electric cars still produce fewer emissions overall than gasoline ones.
• What Needs to Happen Before Electric Cars Take Over the World by Jack Ewing, The New York Times. December 18, 2017. Comparable purchase price, better batteries, more charging stations, and abandonment of our old ways of doing things are the crucial changes that will steer us to an electric-car future.
• Electric cars already cheaper to own and run than petrol or diesel—study by Damian Carrington, The Guardian. 1 December 2017. Lower fuel and maintenance costs now make electric cars an attractive alternative, though government subsidies also play a part.
• Plug-in electric vehicles: future market conditions and adoption rates by Melissa Lynes. EIA International Energy Outlook 2017, October 23, 2017. A fascinating look at different scenarios for the future growth of electric vehicles. [Archived via the Wayback Machine.]
• Electric cars are not the answer to air pollution, says top UK adviser by Damian Carrington. The Guardian, August 4, 2017. Electric cars don't produce tailpipe (exhaust) gases, but they do make significant air pollution from brake and tire dust.
• Electric cars will not stem global demand for oil, says BP by Adam Vaughan. The Guardian, January 25, 2017. The energy giant predicts rising demand for gasoline-engined cars, largely because of traffic growth in Asia.
• Efforts Underway to Develop Better Batteries for Electric Vehicles by Bob Granath. NASA, February 11, 2014. How NASA is, once again, at the forefront of improved EV battery research.
• Bolivia holds key to electric car future: BBC News, 9 November 2008. Will demand for lithium soon outstrip supply?
• Who Killed the Electric Car?: Interesting Wikipedia article about the 2006 documentary movie charging that GM's EV1 car was "killed" by a conspiracy between traditional car makers, the oil industry, and other vested interests.

Practical projects

• How to Build an Electric Vehicle: A thorough practical introduction from Frank Didik, who's clearly learned a huge amount from his own experience.
• Build your own Electric Car!: A step-by-step guide from Instructables.
• Building an Ultra Light-Weight Car, Part 1: Two great articles in Autospeed describe how the Trev electric car was built by UniSA.
• So You Want to Build an Electric Car: Mike Chancey presents a short introduction to converting your car to electric power.
• A $672 electric car, built by two DIYers: Don't want to shell out tens of thousands on the latest e-model? You could always build your own in the manner of Darin Cosgrove and Ivan Limburg, of Brockville, Ontario.

References

1. ↑   According to Seth Leitman's book Build Your Own Electric Vehicle, p.38.
2. ↑   See Compare Electric Cars Side-by-Side on fueleconomy.gov, select "All electric cars," and click the Energy and Environment tab.
3. ↑   There is a good overview of this topic in Non-Exhaust Emissions: An Urban Air Quality Problem for Public Health by Fulvio Amato (ed), Academic Press, 2018.
4. ↑   Fuel comparison figures from fueleconomy.gov; MSRP list prices from edmunds.com.
5. ↑   Fuel comparison figures for 2020 Ford Fusion models from fueleconomy.gov.
6. ↑   Price comparison figures from edmunds.com, retrieved July 2020 (Ford Fusion) and October 2021 (Toyota RAV4).
7. ↑   According to fueleconomy.gov, electric vehicles convert "over 77% of the electrical energy from the grid to power at the wheels. Conventional gasoline vehicles only convert about 12%–30% of the energy stored in gasoline to power at the wheels."
8. ↑   See for example: Volvo plans to phase out gas engines in all its cars by 2030, GM to go all-electric by 2035, phase out gas and diesel engines, VW to end sales of combustion engines in Europe by 2035 and Ford to sell only electric cars in UK and Europe by 2030.