Electric vehicles turn your expectations of a car inside out. So much is different, all feeding through to the driving experience, but something that many non-electric car drivers don’t realise is one of the more attractive things about an EV: electric cars don’t have gears.
How do they achieve this – lacking a gear shift or shifter paddles, and driving seamlessly? Well, let’s explain.
Do electric cars have gears?
Normally, electric cars don’t have gears. The engine of the electric car doesn’t require a multi-speed transmission, because torque is consistently produced at any RPM (or revolutions per minute). This means that gear shifting is unnecessary and counteractive: gearboxes in normal cars typically allow you to decrease torque relative to the speed of the wheels, leading to greater efficiency at faster speeds.
Meanwhile, the efficiency of an electric vehicle motor stays relatively high and stable across a broad RPM range, producing great torque at low RPM.
To put it into simple terms: electric cars don’t need gears because they’re unnecessary. The issues that make gearboxes necessary in petrol vehicles don’t exist in electric vehicles.
However, that’s not to say there aren’t any outliers to this point. The Porsche Taycan, for example, breaks this rule. The first gear gives the Taycan more acceleration from a standing start, while the second gear gives greater efficiency at higher speeds.
Additionally, Toyota (and Lexus) are currently working on gear shifts for electric vehicles that replicate the manual experience, starting with a simulated gearbox on the Lexus UX300e.
Do electric cars have a gear shift?
Well, not really – not in the sense that you might expect, at the very least. Some electric cars retain a shifter in the centre console, such as the Polestar 2, which lets you put the car into neutral, reverse or drive. This is fairly standard shifter functionality, reminiscent of automatic cars.
With this in mind, the standard ‘neutral, reverse or drive’ functionality is either usually located where you might expect the gear shift to be (either in the form of a shift or a knob) or on the wheel in the form of a paddle or lever.
But if we’re going to care about semantics, then we may as well address the fact that most EVs (excluding Teslas) typically include different driving modes – usually a standard mode, a high-performance mode, and an ‘eco’ mode for low power usage. These modes aren’t gears, but impact the performance of your car and battery in a way that similarly lets you tailor your driving experience. It’s not the same thing, but it warrants a mention.
And that’s that. Be kind to your gear shifter – with EV uptake increasing, it’s likely not long for this world.