Hello and welcome to the Electric Vehicle Experience
In today’s episode, we’re talking about the units of measurement for electric vehicles.
Today I’m not saying it’s episode 06. Because in the previous episode which was the 5th, I might have said it was the 1st one.
For the longest time, it was easy to talk about cars and their numbers. For decades and decades, the measurement units were pretty much unchanged.
We talked about power using horsepower.
In a few minutes, you would refuel it with a certain amount of fuel, measured in liters or gallons.
And if you wanted to know fuel economy, you could use liters per 100 kms, miles per gallon, or even kms per liter, depending on where you are in the world.
In the last few years, electric vehicles brought a whole new package of units.
And for most people, when you get in touch with electric vehicles you get a nice big mess. You don’t understand what some units mean, you mistake one for the other and you don’t have a clue if 200 Wh/km means that you’re driving in a very efficient way or if you’re spending too much energy.
Like a friend of mine says… Ask me how I know it…
I keep on seeing people not having clear ideas on this topic. and let me tell you a secret that is not a secret anymore; yes, I stood at that place not too many years ago.
And that’s normal, most of us never needed to.
Let’s talk about electric bills. You might have contracted electricity at home but it doesn’t require you much understanding to use it. If you turn on equipment that uses more power than you contracted, the electricity goes off and you have to turn it on again.
If this happens very scarcely, it’s probably nothing to worry about. If it gets frequent, then you probably are you need more electrical power than the currently contracted. Maybe just go to the next level and that might just do it for you.
One way or another, we’re talking about kW. It’s the amount of electrical power consumed at a certain moment.
Then you go about your life and maybe after the month is over you get your electric bill.
That will tell you how much energy you consumed. That’s not kW, that’s kWh.
kWh represents quantity, how much energy was consumed in a certain time period.
Well, the two units that you will be using the most are kW and kWh. Most people will also be confusing one with the other. Again, ask me how I know it…
Not only they’re used together so many times but also they sound so much alike… it’s really common for people to have trouble distinguishing between them.
After this long rant and before you get sleepy… how does this fit into electric cars?
That’s what we’re going to find out in the second part of this episode. I’m breaking it here not because it’s been going on for too long but because this information is not obvious at first and I prefer that you digest it before we continue.
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Thank you for watching and I’ll talk to you soon