The Electric Vehicle

We may be standing on the precipice of a revolution in propulsion not seen since the internal combustion engine replaced the horse and buggy. The anticipated proliferation of electric cars will influence the daily lives of motorists, the economies of different countries and regions, urban air quality and global climate change. If you want to understand how quickly the transition is likely to occur, and the factors that will influence the predictions of the pace of the transition, this book will be an illuminating read.

Winner of the Engineer-Historian Award from the International History and Heritage Committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot Award given by the Society of Automotive Historians Recent attention to hybrid cars that run on both gasoline and electric batteries has made the electric car an apparent alternative to the internal combustion engine and its attendant environmental costs and geopolitical implications. Few people realize that the electric car—neither a recent invention nor a historical curiosity—has a story as old as that of the gasoline-powered automobile, and that at one time many in the nascent automobile industry believed battery-powered engines would become the dominant technology. In both Europe and America, electric cars and trucks succeeded in meeting the needs of a wide range of consumers. Before World War II, as many as 30,000 electric cars and more than 10,000 electric trucks plied American roads; European cities were busy with, electrically propelled fire engines, taxis, delivery vans, buses, heavy trucks and private cars. Even so, throughout the century-long history of electric propulsion, the widespread conviction it was an inferior technology remained stubbornly in place, an assumption mirrored in popular and scholarly memory. In The Electric Vehicle, Gijs Mom challenges this view, arguing that at the beginning of the automobile age neither the internal combustion engine nor the battery-powered vehicle enjoyed a clear advantage. He explores the technology and marketing/consumer-ratio faction relationship over four "generations" of electric-vehicle design, with separate chapters on privately owned passenger cars and commercial vehicles. Mom makes comparisons among European countries and between Europe and America. He finds that the electric vehicle offered many advantages, among them greater reliability and control, less noise and pollution. He also argues that a nexus of factors—cultural (underpowered and less rugged, electric cars seemed "feminine" at a time when most car buyers were men), structural (the shortcomings of battery technology at the time), and systemic (the infrastructural problems of changing large numbers of batteries)—ultimately gave an edge to the internal combustion engine. One hopes, as a new generation of electric vehicles becomes a reality, The Electric Vehicle offers a long-overdue reassessment of the place of this technology in the history of street transportation.

Fully updated throughout, Electric Vehicle Technology, Second Edition, is a complete guide to the principles, design and applications of electric vehicle technology. Including all the latest advances, it presents clear and comprehensive coverage of the major aspects of electric vehicle development and offers an engineering-based evaluation of electric motor scooters, cars, buses and trains. This new edition includes: important new chapters on types of electric vehicles, including pickup and linear motors, overall efficiencies and energy consumption, and power generation, particularly for zero carbon emissions expanded chapters updating the latest types of EV, types of batteries, battery technology and other rechargeable devices, fuel cells, hydrogen supply, controllers, EV modeling, ancillary system design, and EV and the environment brand new practical examples and case studies illustrating how electric vehicles can be used to substantially reduce carbon emissions and cut down reliance on fossil fuels futuristic concept models, electric and high-speed trains and developments in magnetic levitation and linear motors an examination of EV efficiencies, energy consumption and sustainable power generation. MATLAB® examples can be found on the companion website www.wiley.com/go/electricvehicle2e Explaining the underpinning science and technology, this book is essential for practicing electrical, automotive, power, control and instrumentation engineers working in EV research and development. It is also a valuable reference for academics and students in automotive, mechanical, power and electrical engineering.

In the context of regulations requiring emission so low that electric and hybrid cars will be necessary, Kirsch (industrial ecology, U. of California-Los Angeles) takes the Electric Vehicle Company as a starting point for a vision of an alternative automotive system in which gasoline and electric vehicles would each have been used to supply different kinds of transport services. He argues that technological superiority was in the hearts and minds of engineers, consumers, and drivers. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This book offers a comprehensive yet accessible snapshot of the latest consumer research on the adoption and use of electric vehicles. It discusses the importance of developing a better understanding of consumer behavior in relation to electric vehicles, and the advantages that can be gained from the growing number of electric vehicle users, who can now be studied directly. In turn, it systematically analyzes the leading markets for electric vehicles in North America, Europe and Asia. Bringing together the experience and expertise of authoritative researchers and practicing professionals, the book shares a wide range of empirical data obtained at the national level and summarizes the general lessons learned. The last part of the book discusses policy-relevant insights, forecasts the future evolution of the field in terms of methods and data availability, and addresses several key questions that policymakers and other stakeholders are currently facing.

Considerable work has gone into electric car and battery development in the last ten years, with the prospect of substantial improvements in range and performance in battery cars as well as in hybrids and those using fuel cells. This book covers the development of electric cars, from their early days, to new hybrid models in production. Most of the coverage is focused on the very latest technological issues faced by automotive engineers working on electric cars, as well as the key business factors vital for the successful transfer of electric cars into the mass market.

The volume is dedicated to the electric car. It examines the extent to which the electric car can contribute to sustainable transport development as part of a new mobility culture. The technical, cultural, political, social and aesthetic dimensions are considered. It will be shown how the general social framework has to change in order to make the electric car a success. This book is a translation of the original German edition "Das Elektroauto“ by “Marcus Keichel”, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden in 2013. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.