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Powering Electric Vehicles

If you are interested in finding out more about how electric vehicles are powered, the WMG Centre High Value Manufacturing Catapult, with support from Advanced Propulsion Centre (APC) Electrical Energy Storage Spoke, has created a series of short educational videos to help explain the process of transport electrification.

There are a total of three episodes featuring WMG’s Electric Vehicle experts Professor David Greenwood, Research Fellow Faduma Maddar, and Dr Mel Loveridge.

The links below will take you to each individual video, hosted on youtube.

  1. The Future is Electric
  2. Battery Materials and Sustainability
  3. Powering Electric Vehicles

If you want to take a deeper dive into the topics in the videos, here's a series of posts answering questions that will take you all the way to being an Electric Vehicle expert! Dive in as we ask...

The image shows two cities - one with internal combustion engines and a smog-filled, grey sky. The other has electric vehicles with a clean sky and wind power

Why should we make vehicles electric?

So there are different ways to power a vehicle – what’s the problem with the way that cars have worked for years (petrol or diesel) and why are we spending so much time, effort and money developing electric vehicles?

depictions of electricity and electrical items

What actually is electricity?

To understand how electric vehicles work we’re going to need to know a few things about electricity first. Putting it really simply, electricity is all about pushing electrons around. Let's begin at the beginning...

A cylindrical cell and a pouch cell battery are shown with their insides revealed. The electrodes are shown inside the batteries.

How can we store electricity?

Great, so now we know how we get the power to push the vehicle along. But where does all this energy come from? What actually happens to provide the energy in this circuit?