why vehicles use 12v electric systems? Why a seemingly strange arbitrary figure like 12? Why not 10?
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Car batteries (traditionally) are lead-acid chemistry.
A single cell of a lead-acid battery has a nominal voltage of about 2.2 Volts but work sufficiently down to around 1.8 Volts. So, they average out to around 2.0 Volts.
A single car battery has multiple cells in it (meaning that it’s a battery pack rather than a single battery, technically speaking). Six cells, to be exact.
6 X 2 = 12
Also, early cars were only 6 Volts (3 cells). But as cars got more and more complex, the voltage needed to be increased to accommodate the changes.
So, going from 6 Volts to 12 Volts meant that two 6 Volt batteries could be wired together to give the 12V instead of 10, which wouldn’t require entirely new battery components to be produced.
In the end though, 12 Volt just worked and the carmakers adopted it as a standard across the industry. It is somewhat arbitrary, based just on “we need to pick something, so how about this?”, but there’s quite a bit of logic behind it as well.
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