The Electric Vehicle Revolution

Technology is changing. Horses transformed into gasoline cars. After a century domination gasoline vehicles are now changing into hybrid vehicles and within few years a new era of pure electric vehicles will become mainstream. Hybrid vehicles consist of an additional prime mover along with the engine. It can be an electric motor or a fuel cell or even a CNG gas tank. Pure electric vehicles on the other hand completely replace the engines with an electric motor.

Who Killed the Electric Car?

Electric vehicles are not new. More than a decade back General Motors (GM) came up with a vehicle with an electric motor in it instead of an engine. They called it EV1. The technology was new, the market and people were not ready for it. GM saw the future. The EV1 was made available through limited lease-only agreements. This was more for the “early adopter” to “try out” this new technology. People liked it. Obviously they would.. zero emissions, good torque and a super silent car.. why wouldn’t anyone like it!

But then, what happened. You can see the picture below. GM said,  “Naah! This is a totally unprofitable niche of the auto segment. Not worth investing in it” And they literally crushed ALL the EV1s produced. To your surprise they even took away cars from the customers that wanted to keep them desperately (at any cost). All cars were crushed, stock piled and the program was closed!

EV1 Details

The revenge of the Electric Car

So what happened back then? The market was not ready? The technology was not ready? The infrastructure was not ready? Or was it just the mentality of the automakers that were used to producing gasoline cars for nearly 100 years? There were many such reasons for the death of the electric car. But now emission restrictions are becoming more stringent. 2025 US emission restrictions would definitely force the auto OEMs to produce at least hybrids if not electrics. Electricity is getting cheaper. Electronics is encroaching in the auto industry in every segment, battery technology has improved from lead acid to lithium ion, motor controls have be thoroughly developed in last decade. All these small factors are gearing up and coming together for an electric revolution. Each auto OEM, if you look closely, has at least one hybrid variant (Toyota Prius, Ford Focus etc). A couple of them have pure electric variants (Nissan Leaf) and there are also pure electric companies getting built from ground up (Tesla Motors, Mahindra Reva etc) producing only pure electric cars.

So.. the future is electric. And you guys should gear towards it if you are inclined towards automotive.

What you need to be up to date!

Automobiles now, along with Mechanical engineering, are heavily dependent on Electronics and Electrical engineers. Good EE and ME background, solid conceptual understanding definitely helps. But to be specific for this domain you should be aware of basic powertrain components along with obviously the chassis (vehicle engineering) and the body (design and styling) of the car. Powertrain components here are the electric motor, the inverter and the battery pack. Decent understanding of modeling these components (systems and dynamics), controlling these components (control systems) coding firmware (Embeded software development) for operating these systems and diagnostic/ safety related point of view will be super helpful.