More Background Information on Electric Vehicles

This blog has raised a few questions with people, and here are a couple that have surfaced.

Gearbox?

This Nissan motor has a single speed transmission that contains a differential to drive both front wheels, so that you simply push your foot on the gas pedal and it goes from Whoa to a maximum of about 120 kph.

Reverse is achieved via electronics rather than a mechanical mechanism.

There is an advert on the NZ TV where a couple of retired gentlemen beat up the streets in an electric vehicle.  It is a late 1950's Chevrolet that has had an engine transplant and now uses an electric motor.  In this case, it still has the full automatic gearbox attached to the engine.

Heating and Cooling

Unlike Internal Combustion Engines (ICE) vehicles, a vehicle with an electric engine does not generate a lot of waste heat, so the vehicle cab will be cooler than an ICE car.

To overcome this issue, electric vehicles are usually fitted with a heat pump and small radiator to heat or cool the passengers.  The amount of battery power this function uses impacts the mileage that can be covered.  From what can be viewed on YouTube, the main problem seems to be fogging of the windows, so hopefully airflow will reduce that.

The e-NV200, being a van, has a much larger volume of air to heat or cool than a car, so Nissan have fitted a transparent plastic sheet behind the driver and passenger, to reduce the heating requirement to just the front of the vehicle.  They also decided that it was more efficient to heat the vehicle passengers rather that the air, and have fitted both front seats with individual seat heaters that have high and low settings.  The driver gets a bonus with a heated steering wheel.