Why an Electric Powered Car

Why an electric powered car? All right, fair question. Electric drives are pretty much universal in super-heavy equipment, such as train locomotives and mining trucks, but unlike early trolley car attempts, they aren't battery powered. The standard approach is to run a diesel motor generator, a sort of onboard DC power plant, to drive large electric motors on multiple wheels. Electric motors are relatively simple, can deliver maximum torque without having to get revved up, and don't consume any power when they aren't running. They are also pretty scalable, so an onboard generator combined with battery assist can deliver more peak power than a direct drive diesel. You can think of locomotives and massive dump trucks as hybrids, but I'm not that ambitious.

What attracts me most to the electric powered car, even with all the drawbacks inherent in battery technology, is that they don't care how you make the electricity. Whether you go whole hog with PV panels charging up the battery pack and not driving unless you've had a few days of sun or whether you use off-peak nuclear generated power to charge up, you're doing the environment and the economy a favor. I suppose you could even hook up a bicycle generator to your car and ride for a few days in order to drive a few miles, the important thing is not to burn fossil fuels.

Once the batteries are charged and you start driving around, electric cars are far more energy efficient than their greenhouse gas breathing brethren. Regenerative braking turns the motors into generators when you want to slow down, recharging the batteries instead of wasting the energy in friction heat, as do standard braking systems. As with the super heavy equipment, electric powered cars don't waste any energy idling when you're stuck in traffic, they just sit there. The main efficiency complaint about electric cars is that they spend so much of their energy hauling around the battery pack, but you can reduce that waste by settling for a shorter range, according to the habits of the particular user.

But what really attracts me to electric cars is that line the kid medic delivers to the painless dentist in the original movie version of Mash -"But you're throwing away your whole education." I spent six years grinding through a couple electrical engineering degrees with little but a lack of appreciation for education to show for it. Twenty years later, I'd like to see if there's anything left, and I can understand the manuals that come with the motor controllers, maybe make a few modifications. Hopefully I'll find something at the library tomorrow to get started on DC motor technology, from the beginning.