Electric cars are going to be great when they make it into the mainstream. There are things about them which are going to make them better than the cars we have now. One of these things will be the speed they will be able to hit. Some might say we can’t go too fast anyway, because of the way the highways are set up, but things will be different because electric cars will be controlled by computers and will be able to travel almost bumper to bumper at hundreds of miles per hour. The idea of this scares me, but people who are engineers tell us this is coming. They will be under the control of super computers and will have no steering wheels or any other controls for drivers use since there will be no drivers. Another advantage is electric cars will be much simpler. First of all they don’t need as many parts. No multispeed transmission is needed and for those of you who have had transmission problems in the past, this won’t be a problem with an electric car. An electric car could have one I guess, but most manufacturers won’t include one because it might only make sense under a specific circumstance. An example might be a certain type of race car.

Electric motors produce the most toque at low speeds and taper off at higher ones, the opposite of gasoline engines. That is why a gasoline engines needs a transmission. If it didn’t have one it would tear itself apart trying to get high enough revolutions to make the car go faster. You could say a transmission in a gasoline powered car is there to slow down engine revolutions and still produce more speed. It is strange to think about how long electric cars have been around. When I was a kid bakery deliveries used to be made by companies like Mrs. Wagner’s. They would deliver a pie or cakes to your door and they used electric vans to deliver their goods. The vans didn’t have a great range, but it seemed to be enough to use them as delivery vans. The first electric car built is attributed to Anyos Jedlik in 1828. This was more of a model car. A two wheel electric cycle was built in 1867 and displayed at the World’s Fair in Paris. The first electric production car was built in London in 1884. The invention of lead acid batteries made it possible.

As you can see, electric was way ahead of gasoline for many years. I am also willing to bet if the resources were put into it back then and if big oil was not behind the gasoline engine, electric cars would have come out on top. It is amazing how they never went away completely. We keep hearing about advancements in batteries, but will the battery ultimately be the power source for future electric cars? We are seeing scientists inventing devices to pull moisture out of the air. One small device can accumulate 1.5 liters of pure water in a desert region per day. Why am I bringing this up in an article about electric cars? The reason is simple. Maybe there might be enough electricity in the air which can be tapped to drive an electric car in the future. If not, another way to power our electric car might be to broadcast electricity which it would use as power. There has been a lot of talk about this idea. Think about the benefits of it. The cars would be much cheaper since they wouldn’t need their own power source and they would also be lighter. I like this idea, but it could have some drawbacks. If for some reason power could not be generated or the electrical generation plant went down we would be left with a powerless vehicle.

The mating of electric cars and computers seems much more natural than with gasoline ones. For one thing the power source for both is the same. While that may not matter much now, it might make a difference in the future. I imagine military vehicles will always need their own power source since they couldn’t chance using beamed power. You wouldn’t want to be in a truck or tank and suddenly find out you had no electricity. Electricity is also a power we find throughout the universe. There will probably be far more uses for it in the future than we can think of now. One of the great things about an electric vehicle is if you need more power you can build it with more electric engines or even bigger ones. When we buy gasoline powered cars we are asked what engine profile we want. Do we want a bigger engine, or a supercharged one for example? In the future when we purchase an electric vehicle we may be asked how many motors do we want or what size?

Since electric cars will require less maintenance they will put back money into the economy. The same is true if they get cheaper than their gasoline counterparts. They will also save lives. There are always a certain amount of people who die from carbon monoxide poisoning, because they left a car running in an attached garage. An electric car can run all day without fumes. It could also turn out future electric cars will be able to recoup more lost energy to turn into electricity thus increasing their range between charges.

An electric car just reached 217 miles per hour and it was governed to not go over that speed. Who knows how fast it could have gone. Electric cars are getting more efficient all the time and they can be amazingly fast. As of December 2016 China had the most electric vehicles with 645,708. The United States had 570,187 and all of Europe had 637,552. While this is just a small percentage of vehicles, this percentage is growing. Five percent of all cars on Norwegian roads are now electric plug-ins. Hybrids are only a temporary solution and may be very valuable to collectors someday as Stanley Steamers are today.