Eli5 why electric cars don’t have smthn like reverse thrust while braking (wheels spin backwards in hard braking situation)
In: 0
Put simply, it doesn’t happen because it doesn’t work.
While it’s true that presenting an opposite force would, in theory, cause the car to slow down faster, this wouldn’t work in practice. That’s because the car needs friction to work. The wheels making contact with the road provides it’s movement.
If you tried to make the wheels spin the opposite way while the car was moving, it would begin to skid and you would lose control. Once you lose that contact with the road, the only thing moving the car is the speed it already had and you have no way to stop it.
Of course you *could* strap a jet engine to the front of your car, but they take so long to warm up and produce thrust that, by the time it’s ready, it’s providing thrust to a crashed wreck or, more likely, exploding. Same with rockets. In the time it takes to ignite the fuel source and begin providing thrust, a normal car would have either come to a stop or crashed and exploded due to the rockets onboard.
So, in short, car’s rely on friction to move, so it’s better to rely on friction to stop too. Any kind of emergency thruster is more likely to kill you than save you.
Latest Answers