Why don’t electric cars have gearboxes?

The gearbox is a necessity of internal combustion engines.

The reason is that the necessary mechanical characteristics are highly dependent on the angular speed of the engine, and, unfortunately, the throttle alone is not enough.

At the start, there is a need for torque to develop the necessary acceleration. The first gear, performs this function but, as soon as you start if you try to press on the throttle the engine gets ‘stuck,’ that is, with that gear it must have such an angular velocity that it loses power.

You go into second gear because then at the same speed as the car, the engine turns slower because, precisely, the gearbox determines the appropriate gear ratio.

The same thing soon happens for second gear and so on.

So the gearbox, which is a significant mechanical complication, derives from an inherent limitation of automobile engines.

For example, airplane turbojets, although they are combustion engines, have much greater adjustability: with just the throttle and no gearbox, you go slowly to park next to the hangar, take off and fly at altitude at 800 km per hour.

Electric motors have the same flexibility: a 10-kilowatt motor can go at 0.1 percent of maximum power or 100 percent just by adjustment of the incoming electric power: basically just using the throttle.

So the gearbox would be useless because the same adjustment can be done differently and counterproductive because the gearbox is also counterproductive in normal cars. It just can’t be done without it.