- 11/02/2013
- Posted by: essay
- Category: Free essays
The electric car is an automobile, which is turned into operation with the help of one or several electric engines, but not with the help of the explosive engine. Traditionally there could be defined several types of the cars with the electric engines. There are three of them:
• Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are powered solely by electricity stored in large batteries within the vehicles. The battery powers an electric motor, or motors, which in turn drives the vehicle. The battery needs to be recharged by plugging into recharging points, for example, the mains electricity supply.
• Hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), often simply referred to as hybrid vehicles, are powered by a combination of electricity stored in a battery and either a petrol or diesel internal combustion engine. A hybrid vehicle does not need to be plugged in to recharge its battery, as this is recharged automatically as the vehicle is being driven.
• Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) work similarly to conventional hybrids in that they operate using the vehicle’s petrol or diesel engine or by using electricity to power an on-board electric motor. However, PHEVs have much larger batteries than conventional HEVs and so can also be charged from the mains when not in use – hence ‘plug-in’ – and this means the vehicle can cover a greater distance. There are two key types of PHEV:
The first can run indefinitely with the petrol/diesel motor providing power as in a normal car.
The second is effectively a battery-powered vehicle with a small onboard generator to extend the distance the car can travel (EAE Energy and Environment, 2007)
The Advantages of Electric Car
Among the most widely mentioned advantages that put the electric cars aside from the other vehicles is the absence of damaging emissions. In contemporary ecological situation this could be mentioned among the most significant perspectives of its development: “Good for the environment: Electric vehicles emit lower levels of a range of air pollutants, e.g. nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and greenhouse gases (e.g. carbon dioxide, CO2) than vehicles using conventional petrol and diesel engines. Using electricity to power a vehicle means there is no pollution at all when the vehicle is in use, unlike petrol and diesel cars. A car powered purely by a battery has zero emissions when in operation, whereas the emissions from hybrids and plug-in hybrids are lower than conventional vehicles as they use electricity for at least part of the journey” (EAE Energy and Environment, 2007). The simplicity of the construction, the electricity engine in particular makes the car very reliable and easy to drive. The special attention should be devoted to the operating life of the vehicular part (its operating life is nearly 20 – 25 years), which is much longer than the cars, with the explosive engine. It goes without saying that the good idea is to charge the car from general electric socket, even this way is nearly 5 – 10 times longer from the special charging equipment, and it makes the car easily be used by different target groups.
It should be also noted that the electric car is the single variant of making use of the cheap energy, provided by APS and other electric stations. Comparatively to gas, this use of the energy is not only ecology friendly but much cheaper than gas and other non-renewable natural resources. The massive use of the electric cars could really be a successful solution for the problem of so called “energy peak”, with the help of charging the accumulators during the night time. It is also a well known fact that electric cars provide less noise as they have smaller number of the moving parts and mechanical transmissions than even present day cars. This also assists to the high smoothness of the motion and the ability of charging of the energy sources during the recuperative braking.
It goes without saying that in contemporary scrutinized ecological situation the electric cars would be really successful solution for the cities and it would really help to improve the ecological situation in the whole world. But it should be noted that alongside with the number of drawbacks that prevent the high development of this technique and replacing the cars with the explosive engines
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