The car is driven much like any other car: it has a throttle pedal, a brake pedal, and for now at least, a gear stick.

The brain of the system is a control board that sends signals to the inverter to tell it what form and scale of electricity to send to the motor. It does lots of other things as well, like controlling the giant switches that connect the batteries to the inverter. You can buy boards like this from EVBMW or from OpenInverter. And there is now a greater variety to choose from as many OEM inverters can be controlled over serial links or CAN bus, rather than having to remove their existing control circuits.

The main input from the cabin for this is an electronic throttle pedal.