While the Motor Show opened its doors a few days ago in Brussels, one car stands out a little more than the others: the electric car.
Potential buyers are more and more interested in it, given the skyrocketing prices of conventional fuels and the approaching ban on combustion engines. But electric motors are not new, they have been around for more than a hundred years.
Today they have become very reliable and might last up to a million kilometers. On the other hand, batteries have a more limited lifespan. “Today, it is estimated that the life of a battery is fifteen years. Afterwards, it will have to be replaced, which will extend the life of the car, but this has a significant cost.“, specifies Laurent Blairon, journalist with the automobile monitor. The manufacturers try to make them even more powerful: “They will probably get smaller, take up less space, and try to make them more efficient.“.
Surprisingly, at the beginning of the 20th century, there were as many electric vehicles as thermal vehicles before the second option became the norm. “At the beginning, we didn’t really know which way the automobile was going to take. Finally, it took the thermal route, but we know that several decades ago, there were as many thermal cars as electric ones. The oil lobbies and the Ford factories have made it the internal combustion engines that have taken over“, explains the journalist.