Electric vehicles (EV), are being hailed as part of the solution to reducing urban air pollution and noise, and staving off climate change. Their success hinges on the availability and reliability of fast and efficient charging facilities, both stationary and in-motion. These in turn depend on appropriate integration with the grid, load and outage management, and on the mitigation of loads using renewable energy and storage. Charging management to preserve the battery will also play a key role.

In order to create a reliable, safe and cost-effective electric vehicle with acceptable range, battery charging time, battery life and driving performance, it is important to design optimised and compatible components and charging systems.

Thanks to advances in power electronics device design, digital signal processing technologies and energy efficient algorithms, ac motors have become the backbone of the power electronics industry. Variable frequency drives (VFD's) together with IE3 and IE4 induction motors, permanent magnet motors, and synchronous reluctance motors have emerged as a new generation of greener high-performance technologies, which offer improvements to process and speed control, product quality, energy consumption and diagnostics analytics.