Traffic research is a quite young scientific discipline. One of the main goals is the understanding of traffic dynamics and the occurrence of the “jam out of the blue”. Today it is possible to model and simulate the movement of thousands of cars in large traffic networks very accurately and, on this basis, to make traffic forecasts for one hour or even several days. The main input for the calculations comes from the measurements of 4,500 inductive loops on the highway network of North-Rhine Westphalia. These data are stored for more than ten years in order to establish a historical database. Electric vehicles pose a new challenge to traffic management and traffic forecasts. The behaviour of the users has to be directly connected to the abilities of the vehicles. Planning of routes has to be more careful and take into account the distance it is possible to travel before the vehicles need to be recharged. Up to now only a few electric vehicles are on the roads. Therefore one can only look into the future with simulations.