Why do electric cars accelerate faster than most gas-powered cars, even though they have less horsepower?
In: Technology
In a gas-powered engine, the pulling force comes from fuel going boom. Each time the engine goes round, you get a fixed number of booms. To make the calculation easier, let’s say you get one boom each time the engine goes round. So if the engine goes round once per second, you get one boom per second. If the car speeds up so the engine goes round 50 times per second, you get 50 booms per second, so 50 times more force. This is why gas-powered engines stall at very low speeds and why they need an electric starter motor: if the engine is not going round fast enough, there are no booms and not enough force to keep it going.
Electric engines do not work like this. Instead, electric engines work by electricity going through a wire, which turns the wire into a magnet, which creates the pulling force. All of this is happening continuously, and is (more or less) unaffected by how fast the engine is going round.
Now, the horsepower rating of an engine does not measure how hard the engine can pull. It is a measure of the maximum power output of the engine. This means that if an electric engine and a gas-powered engine have the same horsepower, and if they are somehow in cars with the same gear ratios, then they can pull identical loads at the same maximum speed. However, the electric engine will be able to pull just as hard from 0 speed until it reaches this maximum, whereas the gas-powered engine will not reach its maximum pulling power until the engine is spinning at its optimum speed.
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