It’s not hard to feel overwhelmed by all the jargon, lingo, and acronyms in the electric vehicle world today.

These cars are cutting edge, featuring some of the most impressive engineering and automobile advancements in the last hundred years – but there’s also a lot of confusion surrounding how they work “under the hood”.

Add hybrid vehicles into the mix and you may as well be speaking Greek to someone brand-new to these kinds of cars.

Below we run through (almost) everything you need to know about what EV Mode is when people are talking about electrical cars and hybrids.

Hopefully this shines a little bit of extra light on the topic so that you’re better prepared to discover more about these amazing advancements.

What is EV Mode (For Cars)?

To put it simply, EV Mode in the electric car world really has nothing to do with electric only cars themselves – but instead has to do with hybrid vehicles.

Hybrid vehicles are a cross between traditional Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) and electric engine systems.

At low speeds, these vehicles run almost entirely off of electrical battery power and are near silent in operation. At higher speeds (and over longer distances), these vehicles have an ICE engine that kicks into full gear and they operate just like a traditional automobile would.

Well, but when a hybrid vehicle kicks into electric mode it engages the EV part of the system. The EV stands for “Electric Vehicle”, and it’s an indicator that your car is running off of electrical battery power rather than the ICE engine under the hood.

As a side note, some vehicles are referred to as EVs themselves – but that’s entirely different than EV Mode on a hybrid car.

The acronym EV simply stands for “electric vehicle” and is often used as shorthand for people that are referring to both pure electric cars (like a Tesla, for example) or hybrid vehicles like the Toyota Prius-.

Like we mentioned a little bit earlier, things get kind of confusing when you dive headfirst into the acronym and jargon world surrounding these kinds of vehicles.

We are, after all, still in the infancy of this automotive technology.

Is EV Mode Automatic or Does It Need to Be Engaged Manually?

The overwhelming majority of hybrid vehicles that have EV modes built right in are going to be designed to flip between the EV engine and the ICE engine automatically.

Let’s take the incredibly popular Toyota Prius hybrid vehicle, for example.

These vehicles were one of the first real mainstream hybrid options available for sale, changing the way people looked at electric vehicles altogether.

When these vehicles first turn on they are powered by the EV components exclusively. As long as you keep that vehicle under 15 miles an hour the EV engine is going to do the heavy lifting, propelling you along purely on EV power and keeping the ICE engine out of things entirely.

The moment that the 15 mile an hour barrier is broken, though, the ICE engine engages straightaway and handles the rest of the heavy lifting for you.

This all happens automatically, without you having to do anything whatsoever, and that it switches back as soon as you get down to that 15 mile an hour speed all over again.

Best of all, the transitions are seamless and almost imperceptible. The only way you’ll know that your vehicle has “flipped” from EV Mode to ICE is when you hear the gasoline powered engine fire up.

EV Mode is almost silent, after all. The first few times it happens it can be a little bit disorienting – but it’s nice to know when the switch happens (and that it has in fact switched over).

What Kind of Range Does EV Mode Have?

Most hybrid vehicles with EV Mode are going to feature a relatively restrained range for the EV engine alone, especially when stacked up against 100% electric powered vehicles like anything that Tesla has rolled out.

The Toyota Prius that we have mentioned a couple of times already may have a 640 mile driving range with the hybrid engine, but the EV Mode alone is only going to provide about 25 miles of range.

That’s definitely something that hybrid owners are going to want to consider.

Are There Any Top End Speed Limits to EV Mode?

Like we mentioned a moment ago, most hybrid vehicles that have EV Mode options built right in are designed to operate in a 100% electric engine capacity only until the vehicle reaches speeds of about 15 mph.

Some cars are designed to bump that upper limit to 25 mph, but very rarely does a manufacturer restrict EV operation to lower than 15 mph.

After 50 mph has been “breached” the ICE engine takes over in conjunction with the hybrid operation, and the end result is a vehicle that flies down the road the same way that a traditional ICE only vehicle would.

Then you’re looking at top-end speeds of anywhere up to 140 miles or more, the same kind of thing you’d see with traditional vehicles.

How EV Mode Hybrids Differ From Standard Electric Cars

The main difference between EV Mode hybrids and standard cars is the inclusion of the extra electric motor, designed to handle low speed operations without the need for any gasoline whatsoever.

The switch between these two power plants is almost imperceptible these days, with vehicles going from EV Mode to ICE power back to EV Mode seamlessly.

Sometimes you’ll feel a little bit of a “hiccup” when the vehicle switches from one system to the next, but most of the time the only way you’ll notice any difference whatsoever is when the hybrid engine is drowned out by the ICE exhaust sound.

Expect these vehicles only to get better and better as time goes on.

We are in the very early stages of development for electronic vehicles and hybrids in general, and there’s no telling what these cars are going to look like in the years and decades to come!