With the arrival of equipment grids for vehicles we can finally switch all our transportation to "clean" electricity instead of dirty coal. You are generating electricity in a clean and environmentally friendly way, right? Right?
The most important part of this mod are the transformers. Those are equipment items that can be inserted into compatible vehicles (three of which are provided by this mod, see below) and automatically consume electricity stored in the vehicle's equipped batteries to be used as fuel. They come in two variations, with the low voltage transformer being just enough to power the electric car, and the more expensive high voltage transformer for anything significantly heavier.
This mod introduces electric variations of the three vanilla vehicles: the electric car, electric locomotive and electric tank. It does not modify the base game vehicles for balance and progression reasons. All three come with equipment grids so you can further customize their purpose beyond electric propulsion with roboports, shields, other mod equipment, etc.
The electric locomotive is more powerful than the diesel locomotive but has the same maximum speed. This means it can either pull longer trains or reach its top speed significantly quicker. It also means it can chew through a 20 MJ battery pretty quickly. As is the case for electric locomotives it has no penalty when driving backwards but unfortunately that is only useful if your train is in manual mode and all locomotives point in the same direction (often the case for utility trains like the shuttle or FARL) because automatic trains don't exploit this behavior.
The electric tank has a more power engine, is slightly faster, and a bit more agile, than the vanilla tank and is considered an end-game vehicle. But don't worry, it is nowhere near outrunning the car. It doesn't have any special weaponry, but that's where other equipment comes into play.
Energy density of batteries is significantly lower than that of fuel. A single Battery MK 2 can store 100 MJ whereas a full stack of coal contains 400 MJ. This is something to consider when deciding whether to hop into your electric tank or the good old combustion monster. As an orientation guide the electric car can go on a single basic 20 MJ battery between two and three minutes. The tank won't make it longer than 30 seconds on a single 20 MJ battery and a locomotive sucks it dry after mere 20 seconds at full power. If you're willing to sacrifice the equipment space you might be interested to know that a whopping amount of 16 portable solar panels can power the electric car and the tank can thrive on a mere 60 solar panels.
If you are a mod developer and you wish to use the electric vehicles feature in your mod without the baggage of the items and entities added here check out Electric Vehicles Lib: Reborn as it contains all the logic needed to implement the feature and has no prototypes to clutter your mod.
Please use GitHub to report issues and suggestions.
Re-make of mknejp's Electric Vehicles mod. https://mods.factorio.com/mod/electric-vehicles
I used mknejp's artwork and ideas.