ST. LOUIS — In the first "On The Move" segment about electric vehicles, 5 On Your Side answered questions about charging and charging stations with Ameren and other EV specialists. Watch that segment here for important specifics.
But for this week's segment, the folks at Bommarito let Traffic Anchor Paul Cook behind the wheel of an EV for the first time. The experience was pretty enlightening, and the silence was almost distracting at first.
One of those reasons is called "regenerative braking." So we asked Ameren Illinois' Mark Minden, exactly what is it?
"If you're driving around town, you know within 40 miles, there's a lot of stops. So you're going to work back and forth or in the city, you can actually end up at home with just as much charge as you started because the vehicle will charge itself while you're driving."
A few other things: An EV can weigh about 25-30% more than a normal combustible engine. It's all about the weight of the battery. A combustible engine has about 2,000 moving parts in it, but an EV has only around 20, meaning fewer things to break.
"Also zero emissions," Minden said. "You got to go get a new plate and your check engine lights on and you got to get an emissions test, and now, you got to get your vehicle fixed. You don't have to do that in an electric vehicle. You don't have an emissions test. No oil changes. You never have to get another oil change."
Paul was an EV skeptic due to some of the questions he had initially, and that's a big reason why the number of new EV purchases has declined, among other things. But the technology is here to stay, and eventually, engineers will get more effective and less expensive batteries developed and more charging stations out there.
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