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This Is The Reason Why Electric Cars Only Have A Single Gear

Image: Engineering Explained/ YouTube

Most of the world’s population has never laid their hands on an electric car. We go around comparing engine power, ranges, and the performance of EVs with fossil fueled cars. We even go as far as renaming cars to make it easier to compare them with the electric ones. Not a lot of people delve into the question that why electric cars have only one gear, and some may put it as having no gears at all!

Fossil fueled cars evolved to what we have today in a little over a century. In all these years, we have gotten very used to the multi-gear transmission vehicles. It may be little-known fact but the first ever production vehicle created by Benz in 1886 had a single speed transmission and clutch. After years of adding to the gear ratios and going as high as 10, we saw the CVT (Continuously variable transmissions) vehicles coming in the market that had infinite gear ratios.

That makes one curious as to why an electric car is limited to just one gear. Watch the video below to learn why the internal combustion engines need the gears but the EVs don’t.

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