Write a 6 pages paper on electric and hybrid cars. The pressure from environmentalists and government regulations has seen car makers worldwide develop cunning technologies that aim to reduce the emis

Write a 6 pages paper on electric and hybrid cars. The pressure from environmentalists and government regulations has seen car makers worldwide develop cunning technologies that aim to reduce the emission of carbon footprints from automobiles. Among them is the use of electric and hybrid car technologies (BRIAN, marshal, 2010).

How the technology works

So how do these technologies work?&nbsp. An electric car is a kind that does not burn any sort of fossil fuel to make it run like a conventional petrol or diesel-powered engines. Instead, the car gets its propulsion from an electric motor using energy stored in the cars’ batteries or hydrogen fuel cells. The vehicle can be powered by a variant number of electric motors ranging from one electric motor like that in a G-wiz to a staggering four like those in the new electric Mercedes SLS. The drive train of such cars usually is very light, while the gear system could encompass as little as one moving part (MODERN CARS, 2012). The cars’ weight is mostly contributed by the energy storage system, which in most cases can weigh as much as more than half the weight of the entire vehicle. The great idea behind this technology is that users would be able to plug in their cars to an electric outlet like the power grid and charge up their vehicles' batteries. Once they are fully charged, they can drive for miles without any carbon emissions from the car. Surprisingly this technology was invented as early as the 1880s, but it was surpassed by the internal combustion engines (DAVIS, matt, 2011).

Challenges

However, I think it is fair to mention that electric cars have several challenges that have made them gain such low acceptance in the market chief, which is the mileage that can be achieved from a single full charge. Investors are always trying to figure out how they can have better batteries that can store electric voltages to increase their mileage. Tesla Motors in the United States of America seems to be at the forefront of this technology since they recently launched a range of car batteries used in their cars to achieve top mileage per charge. Electric vehicles can only achieve their sole purpose of being environmentally friendly by tapping into clean electricity sources like wind power and solar, but not that generated due to fossil fuels' burning.