Electrically powered vehicles have been in use for many years! Powering motor cars with electricity does present certain problems, as batteries are heavy and a car’s energy requirement is high. This means that the distance an electric car can travel before it is recharged may be too low for many uses. In hot countries, engineers have experimented quite successfully with supplementing a car’s battery power with solar power, using solar panels on the roof of the car.
Where vehicles can obtain electrical energy from a fixed wire or track, there is no problem about electrical supply. Electrically powered trains, such s the French train are the fastest in the world.
A battery electric vehicle (BEV), pure electric vehicle, only-electric vehicle or all-electric vehicle is a type of electric vehicle (EV) that exclusively uses chemical energy stored in rechargeable battery packs, with no secondary source of propulsion (e.g. hydrogen fuel cell, internal combustion engine, etc.). BEVs use electric motors and motor controllers instead of internal combustion engines for propulsion. They derive all power from battery packs and thus have no internal combustion engine, fuel cell, or fuel tank. BEVs include – but are not limited to – motorcycles, bicycles, scooters, skateboards, railcars, watercraft, forklifts, buses, trucks, and cars.
In 2016 there were 210 million electric bikes worldwide used daily. Cumulative global sales of highway-capable light-duty pure electric car vehicles passed the one million unit milestone in September 2016. As of the end of 2019, the world’s top selling highway legal all-electric car in history is the Nissan Leaf with global sales of 450,000 units, followed very closely by the Tesla Model 3 with 448,634 sales.