2024-02-27
Battery-powered toy car-How do electric cars work? By harnessing the magic of magnetism.
To begin with, an ICE vehicle relies on a tank of gasoline or diesel to get the energy it needs. An EV, on the other hand, requires a battery system, which consists of a multitude of individual cells. And just like a gas tank, the battery cells store energy. “But [a battery cell] also produces power—and the power is a result of the voltage of that particular cell, and the current it’s able to output,” says Charles Poon, the global director of Electrified Systems Engineering at Ford, which makes the Mach-E, the F-150 Lightning, and the E-Transit electric vehicles. He describes the battery as the car’s heart.Battery design in EVs will differ between automakers, and one of the main ways is the shape of their cells. To make things a bit more tangible, consider the Mach-E, an electric car that descends from a famous line of gas-burning vehicles that gave birth to the term “pony car.” The cells in the Mach-E are in pouch form, whereas other batteries in the market have cylindrical cells (Tesla uses those) or prismatic cells. A Mach-E battery system has hundreds of cells. The lithium-ion-based electric car batteries can also have slightly different chemistries. For example, a Mach-E can come with nickel, cobalt, and manganese (NCM) batteries or lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries. The former are known for being able to hold power for longer and performing well in cold temperatures, while LFP batteries are less expensive and can charge up faster.