We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

Some of the reasons why petrol won:<p>There was no electric grid to speak of - even now there is concern the grid can&#x27;t support all EV&#x27;s, once you were outside the cities (and there weren&#x27;t many back then) the grid was spotty. The miracle of being able to pour some cheap liquid in an engine and drive for miles is a considerable achievement.<p>Lead acid batteries weren&#x27;t very good and were expensive (and still are) and don&#x27;t last long compared to petrol engines.<p>Electric motors were big then - it was only rare earth magnets that made them small enough to consider using in cars at high speed&#x2F;ranges.<p>Its always been possible to make a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances but even today there are none like this, because people want to take their cars on the road on the weekend without having to worry. In the 1900&#x27;s it was the call of the open road and cheap travel (petrol was very cheap then) that made petrol win.

* But no sudden technological breakthrough explains the automobile’s arrival in the 1890s either.*<p>Er, steel? Steel was about as exotic as titanium is now until the 1860s when the Bessemer process went into volume production.

Related article (by Alexis Madrigal), &quot;The Electric Taxi Company You Could Have Called in 1900&quot; about an attempt to roll out an electric cab company in NYC and the rest of New England.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2011&#x2F;03&#x2F;the-electric-taxi-company-you-could-have-called-in-1900&#x2F;72481&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;technology&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2011&#x2F;03&#x2F;the-e...</a><p>Another article which touches on the subject: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grist.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;2011-03-28-alexis-madrigal-crazy-greentech-history-powering-the-dream&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;grist.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;2011-03-28-alexis-madrigal-crazy-g...</a><p>&quot;At a time when many people were stuck inside new urban confines, unable to get outside to private spaces, having a car that could tour, a car with a lot of range, was quite appealing.... And it was just sexy to go fast. People like to go fast.&quot;

You can visit Thomas Edison&#x27;s house with his lab near Newark NJ. There are two electric cars on display. Interestingly here it says in 1914 38% of all the cars on the road were electric; 22% gasoline, 40% steam powered.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edisonmuckers.org&#x2F;edisons-cars&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.edisonmuckers.org&#x2F;edisons-cars&#x2F;</a>

We also could have had steam powered cars. Jay Leno once said that he got pulled over on the freeway for breaking the speed limit in his Stanley Steamer from 1906-ish. Darn thing has a top speed of 127mph.<p>My 2018 motorcycle tops out at 110mph, to give you a comparison.<p>Why don&#x27;t we have steam cars?<p>Because in the early 1900&#x27;s steam cars they couldn&#x27;t compete with the elegance of ICE vehicles. The engines were big and heavy, the fuel was hard to manage, they took a long time to warm up, etc etc. The internal combustion engine was just a way better tool for the job.<p>Same reason electric cars didn&#x27;t win: The ICE was just a way better tool for the job at the time. This is now changing, but very slowly.<p>Tesla, for example, still doesn&#x27;t have an official Nurburgring lap time because it simply isn&#x27;t able to drive at racing speeds for long enough without the battery overheating and reducing power output to avoid damage. Yes racing electric cars exist and they&#x27;re awesome, but even Formula E swaps cars in the middle of the race because a single car can&#x27;t last long enough.[1]<p>It does look like VW&#x27;s electric supercar currently attacking the Nurburgring lap record. Already holds the absolute record for Pikes Peak. Exciting times we live in :)[2]<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;What-is-the-time-clocked-in-by-Tesla-Model-S-in-N%C3%BCrburgring" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.quora.com&#x2F;What-is-the-time-clocked-in-by-Tesla-M...</a><p>[2]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;vws-record-breaking-electric-car-takes-on-worlds-scariest-racetrack-nurburgring&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;cars&#x2F;2019&#x2F;05&#x2F;vws-record-breaking-ele...</a>

I don&#x27;t think you can discount the military applications as a factor. It is not as extreme as in aviation in terms of raw innovation, but without the demand for millions of engines for trucks, tanks, jeeps, and all the other machinery of war sparked by the warfare of the first part of the 20th century, the internal combustion engine would not be as ubiquitous as it is today. In thirty years armies went from marching on oats and horseshoes to petrol and Goodyears.<p>Maneuver warfare would have been impossible on electric. And then when the war was over, all that surplus machinery was around, and so were the factories that built it.

<i>We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning</i><p>All true. If we ignore the massive increase in infrastructure needed to make them viable outside of cities. And also ignore, as the article does, the time it would take to charge along with the short lifetime of batteries in that era. It doesn&#x27;t matter if their range equaled that of an IC, the IC could be ready for the next leg of a trip almost instantly compared to an EV. Effectively this halved the range of an EV. If you could only drive 60 miles and there was no guaranteed prospect of charging at the end, you had to be able to return home to charge, meaning 30 miles out and 30 miles back.<p>All issues that still represent bottlenecks to EV adoption today, albeit much less so, and which are gradually being overcome.

When I visited the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, I was surprised to find out, that Porsche&#x27;s first car was an Electric one :-)<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Porsche_P1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Porsche_P1</a>

Battery technology has been, and to a certain degree still is the limiting factor for electric cars...and the fact is that gasoline is still a denser form of energy storage than batteries by volume, weight etc..<p>I&#x27;m saying this as a someone who prefers electrics over ICE...

<i>Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles, but didn’t give riders the same illusion of freedom and masculine derring-do</i><p>Isn&#x27;t that the same reason we still don&#x27;t all drive electric cars?<p>I was always disappointed that NEV&#x27;s didn&#x27;t take off, seems like a perfect solution for cities and even suburbs -- lanes could be striped much narrower and parking could be much more dense.<p>But few people want to drive a glorified golf cart to the office, even if they only drive 10 miles and are stuck in stop and go traffic anyway, so the 25mph NEV cap wouldn&#x27;t really change their commute time.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neighborhood_Electric_Vehicle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Neighborhood_Electric_Vehicle</a>

&gt; <i>Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles</i><p>This article talks a lot about cars around 1900.<p>In the US in 1900, 60% of the population lived in rural areas and only 40% lived in cities. (See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Urbanization_in_the_United_States#Historical_statistics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...</a>)<p>So working well in rural areas was probably a more important concern. A product that works OK for all your potential customers is better (from a business&#x27;s point of view) than one that works a bit better for some customers and not at all for others.

If we replaced all cars with EV&#x27;s how much greenhouse gas would we actually curb? I know we&#x27;re shifting the strain of the car producing greenhouse gases tp the power plant. Anybody know the numbers?<p>Intuitively I always thought the only way of actually making a dent in emissions is to change the way we live by shifting to public transportation. Suburbia is what makes the US the leading greenhouse gas producers and only changing the way we live to be more like cities such as NYC or Tokyo do we actually stand to make a change. We need to reduce the usage of cars to make a meaningful dent in greenhouse gas emissions.

They could&#x27;ve worked in cities. Lead-acid batteries, though, have never had the energy&#x2F;weight ratio necessary for the type of long-range driving necessary outside of highly urbanized areas.

Unpopular opinion, but I truly feel battery powered cars are a dead end. Gas won out over earlier models because of its unique properties, most of which is its easy availability and high energy density. Batteries are heavy, and range limited. A true successor to the ICE must offer the same freedoms afforded. Whether it&#x27;s super fast charging, nuclear, or a greener fuel, though, I&#x27;m not sure.

It&#x27;s amusing to see people &quot;Monday morning quarterbacking&quot; on one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. &quot;We could have done it ANOTHER way!&quot; ignores the fact that it might not have happened at all.

So I started reading popular mechanics 1905-2005 last weekend, in the first issue of 1905 they actually show a little blurb about electric mail trucks, I knew EVs went way back but found it pretty neat.

Early models of Ford&#x27;s Model T had adjustable carburetors to run on ethanol with gasoline as an option.<p>Not electric, but renewable, sustainable, and I&#x27;d assume (maybe wrongly) mostly carbon neutral.

Hindsight is 20&#x2F;20.

Perhaps we could have had electric vehicles sooner, but we would have needed clean sources of electricity, not coal powered generation, to make a difference.

Why would we have had electric car from the beginning? Producing an E-car consumes more energy than a car with an internal combustion engine, the milage is a joke. And if electricity is coming from coal power plants it is all but green.