It’s always a tricky thing to get to grips with a new technology. And one of the hardest parts is getting to know and understand the terminology used. So we’ve pulled together some of the most popular buzzwords surrounding EVs and hybrids.

Amps

Amp is short for Ampere. It’s a unit of measurement of the amount of electrical current flowing. You’re most likely to hear amps mentioned with home chargers being labelled as 16 or 32 Amp units.

AC

This stands for Alternating Current. It refers to the electricity in our grid and homes flowing in both directions at regular intervals. For EV drivers, you hear the term referring to chargers. AC current will generally be used in slower chargers (7kW up to 22kW) that you’ll see at homes and carparks. This is in comparison to the much faster DC units that typically deliver 50kW or more.

BEV

This stands for Battery Electric Vehicle. It refers to vehicles that are fully electric. They have no combustion engine and move solely through the power stored in the car’s battery.

CHAdeMO

This is a type of connector that will be very well known to LEAF and Outlander PHEV drivers. It is the connection that gets plugged into the car when you want to fast charge from a DC unit. Although at this stage in Ireland, it is beginning to be phased out. The vast majority of new cars being sold have the CCS connector.

CCS

This stands for Combined Charging System. If you’re buying an EV in Ireland that’s not a LEAF, you’re probably getting this as the connector that you will use for fast charging on a DC unit. The combined term refers to the fact that the socket is a standard Type 2 connector combined with an extra couple of pins that allow it to charge quickly on DC units.

DC

This stands for Direct Current. This is when the current only flows in one direction. Unlike the electricity that runs in your house which is AC, DC units allow energy to be put back into your battery at a much faster rate. They can reach peaks of about 300kW in the Lucid Air. The sockets used on DC, apart from older Renault Zoes, are CHAdeMO and CCS.

EVSE

This stands for Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment. Technically speaking, it is what we should be calling the units that we normally refer to as chargers. In reality, the chargers are built into the car and the EVSE just delivers that energy to the car.

Fuel Cell

Fuel Cell refers to vehicles that are powered by Fuel Cells. In this case, people are probably referring to hydrogen vehicles. The technology is improving, and applications for use in shipping, farming, trucking and aviation are becoming much more viable. But use for passenger vehicles seems unlikely to become viable, at least for many years to come.

Hybrid

A hybrid can refer to a plug-in hybrid (PHEV) or a non-plug-in hybrid. It describes a car that has both an electric and combustion motor. There is also a sub-category of mild hybrid, where the electric motor cannot move the car on its own. Check out our other piece which goes into a lot more detail here.

ICE

This stands for Internal Combustion Engine. It refers to the type of car that we’ve had for decades now…powered by petrol and diesel engines. Thousands of tiny explosions drive pistons, which in turn moves the car.

kW and kWh

kW stands for kilowatt. It is perhaps the term that is most confused in the EV world. People accidentally use kW instead of kWh and vice versa. A kW is a measurement of power. The motor in a Peugeot e208 is 100kW, which is about 135hp. We also measure how fast we are charging our cars in kW. So the e208 can charge at a peak of 100kW.

This is very different to a kWh, which is a kilowatt hour. When we refer to kWh, we are normally talking about the size of the battery. The e208 has a usable battery of 45kWh. We are all fairly accustomed to the notion of a kWh, which we generally see reported on our electricity bills as a ‘unit’.

PHEV

This stands for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle. These are cars that have both a combustion engine and an electric motor that can be plugged in to charge. This is opposed to the technology that Toyota generally employ, where the car cannot be plugged in and is 100% powered by burning fossil fuels. PHEVs have a range of sizes of batteries, with some large SUVs having about 30kWh.

Range & Range Anxiety

This refers to the distance that your car is capable of travelling on a full charge, from 100% down to 0%. Just like with petrol and diesel car’s range, there is no exact figure that you can give. It depends on the type of road you’re on, the speed, the outside temperature, traffic, and a whole host of factors. But perhaps the largest factor is the size of the battery, and how efficiently the car uses that energy.

The term Range Anxiety generally refers to people worrying that they won’t have enough range to get to their destination. It is one of the reasons many people are reticent about going electric.

In terms of modern EVs, something like the Honda e will have a real-world range of just under 200km. That could be 150km on the motorway, or up to 240km with careful city driving. But a car like the Model S Long Range will do a fast motorway journey from Belfast to Cork in winter on a single charge. In summer, you’d probably clear 600km range.

Regenerative Braking

Regen for short. This is a means of slowing the car down and using that energy to charge up the battery. In a petrol or diesel, you slow the car by applying the friction brakes. This creates waste heat as the car slows down. With Regen in an EV, you can harness the energy of a moving car by turning it into electrical energy for the battery.

In practical terms, it means that you can descend a hill, and end up at the bottom with more range in the battery than what you had at the top. It is one of the reasons that EVs are so much more efficient. Also, some EV drivers go years, over 100,000km on the original brake pads of their cars as they typically use Regen to slow down.

The amount of Regen will change in each car. In most cars, you can adjust the strength of the Regen that the car will apply. It also makes for a very smooth drive, and you may do the vast majority of your journey without touching the brake pedal!

WLTP

This stands for Worldwide Harmonised Lightweight Vehicle Test Procedure. We are particularly interested in the WLTP range of cars that come out of the testing. It is a good way of comparing the various ranges of EVs.

It is important to know that it is a figure that refers to a combination of driving conditions. It tends to be optimistic, and in winter you are unlikely to get the range indicated. For example, the VW iD.4 might have a WLTP range of about 500km. Now you may exceed that in gentle driving in summer. But on the motorway in winter, travelling at 120kmh from Cork to Dublin, it will likely to drop to 300-350km.

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