Vault Stories: An Electric Past
Tracing the history of electric vehicles in Long Beach
“No no no no no no no… don’t do this. Not now. Please, please don’t die on me…”
The instrument display showing the electric range on my Chevy Spark EV was counting down at an alarming rate. When I left Long Beach, it showed a comfortable 34 mile range. The map showed that work was only 27 miles away — a short sprint up the 405 freeway. But, miles from my destination, the Spark showed signs of an early demise. An alarm sounded in the cabin when the range fell to 10 miles, followed by an ominous warning on the LCD display: “PROPULSION POWER LIMITED.”
The last thing I wanted was for this to be yet another article about an electric car that leaves its driver stranded. So, in spite of an external temp of 98º F, I was driving with the windows up to reduce air resistance and turned off the climate control and radio. Still, the reported range shot down faster than the miles I traveled, and by the time I limped off the 405, the readout showed a reserve of only 5 miles. Work was still 8 miles away. The math didn’t add up.
I started feeling pretty hopeless. This wasn’t supposed to be a story about dead batteries, but about how advanced the Battery Electric Vehicle (“BEV”) has become. It was supposed to be a story about unraveling the mystery of the BEV’s predecessor, the Neighborhood Electric Vehicle (“NEV”); a story about why its creator chose a tiny, sea-side town in southern California for his invention. This was supposed to be a story about Long Beach…
If you wish to take the pulse of modern-day, middle class Long Beach, you must first wake up before 11 AM, then loaf southward to Bixby Park. There, at a patch of earth overlooking the Pacific Ocean, beneath the shade of three trees planted a hundred years ago by old man Bixby himself, is where modern Long Beach comes together to practice yoga. It’s free; you’ll see as many bare feet on grass as you will on Gaiam-branded yoga mats. On weekends, crowds swell into the triple-digits.
At least on weekends, the Port of Long Beach isn’t running at full-capacity, and those aspirational yogis don’t have to balance their quest for inner purity with a view that could only be described as post-apocalyptic: Container ships battling for space at one of the world’s most active harbors, and all the NOx and unburned hydrocarbons and that title denotes.
Long Beach is a proper city, running all the way from the stacks of containers and cruise ships at the port to the mansions atop Signal Hill and all points in between. Long Beach City is still the “LBC” that Snoop rhymed about. The “C” in those lyrics originally denoted a gang: the Long Beach Crips. They’re still active, too. The iconic recording of a police officer requesting backup in Sublime’s ode to the L.A. riots, “April 26, 1992," the police are requesting backup on East Anaheim Street in Long Beach. Anaheim St. is still the dividing line between neighborhoods north and south, immigrant and gentrified.
Yet, if you keep your gaze south of Anaheim, with all the “new-urbanist” reclamation taking place downtown, it can feel as if Long Beach is undergoing a major shift: Just like when waves of midwesterners immigrated to the little California bungalows lining the ocean after World War I; just like in 1975 and 1979, when two waves of refugees from Cambodia settled on the eastside near Anaheim St., a new wave has set about making the city in its own image.
The current wave—if it can be called that—are outspoken about gay rights, in keeping with Long Beach’s tradition of gay activism. They are decidedly pro-bike and car-ambivalent (according to a columnist at the Orange County Register.) Some of them are refugees from Los Angeles. Others are blissfully oblivious of the traffic, the congestion, and the inflated rents that are common in that gargantuan megalopolis twenty miles to the north.
The two cities, Los Angeles and Long Beach—the first- and second-most populated in L.A. County—were linked forever in the mid-’60s by a then-futuristic, ten-lane stretch of pressed concrete formally titled “San Diego Freeway” or “Interstate 405" but referred to by local residents ever since as the “four-oh-five.” When Long Beach’s share of the 405 was completed in 1964, the officials cut the opening ribbon (a stainless-steel chain) with a laser beam. The chain exploded, and the awaiting motorists drove straight into the 405's first traffic jam. The freeway has been jammed every day since.
And yet, a low percentage of Long Beach residents participate in this commute. Only 4.2%, according to city-data.com. I am one of those suckers participating in this “rush hour”—my job at the Petersen Museum requires a 40-mile round-trip commute. Should be the perfect distance to drive a modern EV without contracting a case of that most modern syndrome: “range anxiety.”
Case in point: I’ve been driving an all-electric Chevrolet Spark EV for the past week. Though the man from General Motors’ delivery service parked the Spark at my front door with a reported electric range of less than 80 miles, after spending four days with the car, I didn’t yet felt the need to recharge.
It’s a lovely little thing, too. One of three concepts commissioned by GM in 2007 to appeal to millenials, including DJ-inspired names: “Groove,” “Beat,” and “Trax.” GM held a survey to gauge public response to the concepts, promising that the most popular design would actually be built. The Beat was the sharpest design of the trio; the concept’s dynamic creases, styled to conform to industry-wide safety regulations, have made their way to the production-ready Spark.
It is miracle enough when the car in the dealership showroom bears even a passing resemblance to the car which appeared on stage at the auto show. The Spark manages to handle better than a concept car, too. Even if your daily driver is a Rolls-Royce, the engine noise from this little Spark is softer—nearly nonexistent. The feeling that you get while driving is difficult to describe, as if your whole motoring history has been a history of guilt and gas and this micro-EV is the pennance.
Driving the narrow strip of Ocean Blvd., looking out at the massive tanker ships waiting to be picked clean by row after row of gantry cranes, it seems like we all have quite a lot to account for. Though Long Beach is spared much of the smog from the morning traffic jams, the Port of Long Beach is still one of the most polluted places in California. The port is also one of the most lucrative places in California, generating $5.1b in state tax revenue. And even though this Spark wears the Chevy bow tie, its country of origin was Korea—in all likelihood, this car caught its first glimpse of America at either the Port of Long Beach or the adjacent Port of Los Angeles. Welcome home, little Chevy.
“ROMANTIC CATALINA ISLAND IS JUST A TWO-HOUR CRUISE FROM LOS ANGELES-LONG BEACH HARBOR” ~ 1950s-era promotional postcard.
If the Spark EV had arrived at the port 60 years earlier, it would have been among friendly company: The roads of post-war Long Beach were teeming with electric cars. The sidewalks were teeming, too—regulations were so loose in the 1950s that these NEVs were allowed to drive alongside the pedestrians. Safety incidents were so common these electric three-wheelers became known as the “scourge of the sidewalks.”
At its height in the 1950s and ’60s, there were no less than nine electric car companies located in the southern California area, with several headquartered in Long Beach. They manufactured and sold three-wheeled EVs with names like “Mobilette,” “Marketeer,” “Markettour,” the “Electra–King,” the “Electro-Master,” the “Sports Rider,” and (my favorite) the “Electric Shopper.” Most famous of all of the early electrics was a company called Autoette.
When I began researching the electric vehicle, the history I was seeing online was incomplete. Even well-cited EV timelines seem to leave out a chunk of history between 1921 and 1956. Finding the inventor of the NEV proves tricky because so many people have claimed credit for its creation. At least, with Autoette, much of the literature points to one guy—a former welder named Royce Seevers.
In fact, nearly every source I could find, Seevers founded Autoette in 1948 and controlled the company continuously until his death, with a brief interruption before 1958 where the company was owned by the “Blood Sales Co.” and “Wayne Manufacturing Co.” The main resource for Autoette info online, the Autoette Project, was even dedicated to Royce Seevers. Yet, when I contacted the man behind the Autoette Project (and current executive director of the NHRA Motorsports Museum), Larry Fisher, and asked him to tell me about the founder of the Autoette, his reply was rather blunt: “Throw out any credit to Royce Seevers for the Autoette or the industry.”
After a little cajoling, Larry Fisher told me about the Autoette’s true founder:
The Autoette story starts decades earlier, and it starts in Kentucky with an enterprising electrical engineer from a whole family of engineers. When Robert Tafel’s father died in 1914 of a heart attack at age 47, his two sons were forced to take over the family business. Robert’s father was the only electrical engineer with an Edison License in the state of Kentucky, but after he died, the family business involved servicing washing machines and hawking vacuum cleaners. Robert wanted out—he borrowed the money to build a company from his mother and in 1936, moved with his wife-to-be to a bustling city by the sea called Long Beach.
At first, Robert and his young wife lived with her parents in a cottage not far from the ocean. Robert’s father-in-law was in the furniture business, and he spent his first days in Long Beach filling custom orders for fancy chairs and chaise lounges. Robert’s interests and expertise lay elsewhere: Upon arriving in Long Beach, he was struck to see the city’s residents driving around town in tiny electric three-wheelers.
These early EVs had a formal name—“Custer” cars, after their manufacturer, L. Luzern Custer—and an ugly nickname: “invalid chairs.” These Custer Chairs were sold first with electric power, and then offered later with gas engines as an optional extra. After World War I, disabled veterans were encouraged to move to warmer climates for “fresh air” and a little “R & R.” Many midwesterners did, giving the city its humble nickname: “Iowa-by-the-Sea.” Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was not yet a diagnosis; Long Beach’s temperate climate was supposed to offer sufficient therapy to these wounded ex-warriors.
As he observed these Custer cars scooting down the beachside streets and sidewalks, Robert Tafel believed he could build a better machine. He purchased a Custer and began the process of reverse-engineering…
“Back… back… we’re going to parallel park you right in front of Double Dozen.” Eric is the chief mechanic at the Petersen Museum and those words would have been the last I’d ever hear if I crunched the front end of a priceless, hand-built hot rod. Good thing the Spark is easy to park. “You should’ve seen it when we drove the Duesenberg down here. No room at all…”
The reason I’m driving the Spark inside the Petersen’s famous car vault is, well, slightly embarrassing. This was three days before my own crash-landing; the Spark ran out of juice twice in one week.
My fault for not charging it, I suppose. When my girlfriend Leslie drove it up into the city from Long Beach, the Spark reported it would make the trip with 14 miles to spare. By the time she fought Thursday traffic through Little Ethiopia to the Petersen, the Spark showed only 5 miles remaining in its battery cells. Worse, as Leslie was careening down the Alternate-405 into Los Angeles, the Spark started sounding alarms — no doubt to warn clueless drivers that their electric cars can’t be driven perpetually. That same worrying announcement appeared on the dash: “PROPULSION POWER LIMITED.”
Not the most comforting message to pop up as you’re diving headfirst down a 55-MPH hill, so when she pulled inside the museum’s parking structure and finally stepped from the Spark, Leslie made a sad face and said, “I don’t like it anymore.” So, that’s why the Spark is plugged in to an outlet at the Petersen Automotive Weekend Spa and Clinic. We’ll pick it up again on Monday…
Back to our friend, Robert Tafel. After dismantling his Custer Chair, Tafel decided to show his creation at Long Beach’s most well-trafficked spot—a fabulous boardwalk with carnival games popular with visiting sailors and a fearsome rollercoaster called the Cyclone—the world-famous (now-defunct) Long Beach Pike.
Back in the late 1930s, there was a town personality local to Long Beach — a knife sharpener who took his services mobile on the back of a Custer Car. Robert Tafel was not a born marketer, but in a shrewd move, decided to debut his electric vehicle at the Pike’s boardwalk next to the traveling salesman’s cart. Larry Fisher has a photograph of the two cars together in his collection, and he told me the differences were obvious even 80 years ago. The Autoette was clearly a superior product, and Robert Tafel and his family enjoyed many profitable years to come. Kenny Howard (a.k.a. Von Dutch) drew the pinstripes on early Autoettes. Bob Hope was Autoette’s celebrity spokesperson, and claimed the company “Put the Go in Golf.”
But I was still curious about Royce Seevers. Why did he claim ownership of the Autoette? I had to call Larry Fisher…
Royce Seevers did indeed preside over Autoette and contributed to the public relations stunt at the Thunderbird Country Club in 1951 (making the Autoette one of the earliest golf carts, though the three wheels tore divots throughout the fairways.) First working for Autoette as a welder, Seevers moved up in the company, eventually becoming its treasurer. But this was after World War II; as Fisher investigated further, he found the dates didn’t add up.
First and foremost, Larry Fisher is a historian. His interest in Autoette began not in California but in Rhode Island, when he was the executive director of the Herreshoff Marine Museum in Providence, a museum that specializes in competition-grade yachts. Captain N.G. Herreshoff, the museum’s namesake and benefactor, was dissatisfied with gasoline-powered cars after one burst into flames on the deck of his yacht. After the fire, Cpt. Herreshoff purchased a full-sized EV for himself and a child-sized model for his daughter.
After years of hearing and re-telling this story, Fisher decided to start collecting early electric vehicles. His garage is more of a comprehensive history of rarities and dead-ends in the development of the electric vehicle. Over years of rebuilding NEVs, Fisher taught himself how to decode Autoette serial numbers. The earliest VIN, sent to Fisher by one of his blog’s readers, was from an Autoette manufactured in 1939—years before Seevers reportedly founded the company. Stamped into the metal nameplate was a different name and an unfamiliar provenance: “TAFEL ENGINEERING CO, LONG BEACH CALIF.”
Fisher made contact with the Tafel family and earned their trust. They told him the true story, the one I related above: Robert Tafel was the true creator of the Autoette.
Like many inventors, Tafel was a reluctant businessman. He was lucky enough to find a partner who, from all accounts, enjoyed the art of the deal, a man named Newton Blood of the Blood Sales Company. Blood was so profit-minded that when the field of Autoette copycats swelled in the late 1950s, he opted against suing them, and instead became their top supplier for EV parts.
It was Blood who took Autoette from cottage industry to a full production line, Blood who arranged a partnership with the Cushman cart company to build an electric “Minute Miser” which could be seen zipping around industrial complexes and factory floors for decades to come. A significant early sale was to the ALCOA Aluminum company. All the dealmaking paid off—in 1949, business was so profitable that Blood bought out the company.
And so, Robert Tafel, the man who first conceived of the all-electric neighborhood three wheeler, whose family dinner table discussions gave name to the Autoette, was no more to be involved with the company he founded.
Blood’s timing was good. Productivity was on the rise after WWII, and many ex-military mechanics, engineers, and workmen gravitated to Long Beach to put pumpjacks on the town’s numerous oil wells, to work in the hangars assembling DC-3s and C-47 Skytrains for Douglas. One recently-discharged welder who found his way to the Long Beach area was named Royce Seevers.
Naturally, this was the same Royce Seevers whose descendents currently claim was the founder of Autoette, though in reality, Seevers started working as a welder for a rival company, the California Electric Car Co.. Seevers had ambition, and quickly worked his way out of fabrication and into the sales office, eventually jumping ship to work for Newton Blood. Seevers didn’t stop until he was elected treasurer and partner of Autoette, and once Blood sold his stake in the company, Seevers operated and managed Autoette until its death in the late 1970s.
Now, at this point, I have to say it’s difficult to judge Royce Seevers for claiming credit for the Autoette. Certainly his predecessor, Newton Blood, did a similar thing in 1952, when he told the Long Beach Press-Telegram that the Autoette was all his idea in their special “Parade of Progress” edition. A Ms. Mary Spencer of Plainview, Texas—a longtime friend of the Blood family—was stricken by a case of arthritis and, at least according to his story, Blood invented the Autoette with Spencer in mind as early as 1936.
Perhaps their egos were buoyed by the regional boosterism rampant in newsrooms of that era. Even the creator of my favorite Long Beach NEV, a French-Canadian immigrant named Wilfrid Billard, claimed to his hometown newspaper’s weekend magazine that the Electra-King was “his own design.” In reality, the design was shared with the Kelsen Electric Sports Rider with internal components purchased from Autoette.
It is the prerogative of the living to lay claim to the past. The dead, after all, must remain quiet. Any industrial endeavor as wide-ranging as the Autoette is going to collect its share of “founding fathers”—certainly the neighborhood electric vehicle owes a huge debt to Seevers’ tireless promotion, as it does Newton Blood’s business acumen in the early ‘50s and Gil Wayne’s in the late ‘50s (for a time, Autoette was owned by a street sweeping outfit called the Wayne Manufacturing Co. of Pomona, CA). Wayne sold his company—and the Autoette legacy—to Royce Seevers in 1958. And then there were the eight other electric car companies profiting from the sale of rebranded Autoettes.
Of course, there would be no legacy of EVs in Long Beach without Robert Tafel’s original innovation. And without the research compiled by Larry Fisher, it’s likely that the Tafel name would remain unheralded. Fisher himself has a large stake in this history: Not only is he planning a book and filming a documentary entitled Driving Autoette, Fisher has quite literally invested in the Autoette—his garage full of NEVs stands to increase in value handsomely once their history is properly told.
So, it’s understandable that Larry Fisher would be protective of that history. Fisher is the keeper of the flame when it comes to early electric vehicles—a veritable Autoette encyclopedia. Fisher took real effort to earn the trust of the Tafel family, so I wasn’t too surprised a week after our phone call when he emailed me requesting that I leave out the part of the EV history that mentions Robert Tafel. Instead, Fisher suggested I should “simply refer to the the company’s origins extending back to the 1930's in Long Beach.”
Well, there’s no point in releasing a history of the NEV if it’s going to be purposely incomplete. I had to find an alternate source to corrobrate the Fisher’s story without offending the Tafel family — and I found the best source possible: The Tafel family itself, who reported the news on their family website.
Of the nine Southern California companies offering neighborhood Electric Vehicles in the 1950s, a couple of them have actually survived. Taylor-Dunn, which started making electric vehicles for chicken farmers, is still in business manufacturing EVs for industrial use. The Trojan Battery company, which collaborated with Autoette to make the first purpose-built EV battery in 1952, not only is still in business—that very battery, the T-105, is still produced today.
The namesake of Wilfrid Billard, the B&Z Electric Car Company—the manufacturers of the “Electra-King” and my favorite “Electric Shopper”—are still in business. They make golf carts. And if you want to pay homage to the origin of the electric vehicle in Long Beach, you should drive north on Cherry Street. Just beyond the on-ramp to the 405, in a lot filled with golf carts in various states of disrepair, there sits an Electric Shopper. It’s a late model, with a steering wheel in front of the driver’s seat instead of a tiller. Though it’s been graffitied and neglected for a number of years, in all likelihood, a new set of batteries and a proper charge would be all that’s needed to bring this Electric Shopper back from the dead.
There are untold numbers of Autoettes and Mobilettes and Marketeers that suffered less-dignified fates. By the late 1970s, the EV industry in Long Beach was nonexistent—slowly drowned out by increasing regulation and a public that had turned against neighborhood electric cars.
In his book Growing Up in Long Beach, newspaper columnist Tim Grobaty recalls public sentiments regarding the drivers of these NEVs:
“We will further note that some autoette pilots were repeat drink-and-drive offenders who took to the transportation because you didn’t need a driver’s license to operate the electric cars on the sidewalks. So, it’s not fair to say all autoette drivers were elderly. It’s more balanced to say that they were all elderly and/or drunk.”[sic] ~The Scourges of the Sidewalk, Grobaty, 2013
For nearly a decade starting in the ’60s, the Long Beach Press-Telegram ran weekly editorials by an opinion columnist named George Robeson railing against electric three-wheelers. Yes, the same newspaper which praised the Autoette in its “Parade of Progress” also decried it once the EV was involved in a series of gruesome accidents. The first occurred in 1952, involving an Autoette which skidded 58 feet before discharging one of its occupants (a Mrs. Jobe, of Long Beach, CA, who also died from wounds sustained during the accident) into the curb at the intersection of Walnut and Clark St., Autoettes were relegated to the secondary lane.
The second accident followed in 1966, when an elderly Autoette owner struck a ladder while driving on the sidewalk, causing a 51-year-old neon sign installer to fall from the top of the ladder. The man later died of his injuries. The consequences were stern, but not swift: Five years later, Autoettes were banned from the sidewalks.
Increased taxation and regulation inevitably followed: First the city and then the state wanted to tax the vehicles. Not only did the EVs have to be registered, they had to conform to state-wide safety regulations, and the additional seats, bumpers, and turn signals brought additional weight and shortened the range. When the last Electra-King rolled off the assembly line in 1982, its total range was about 30 miles—about the same as a modern day GEM neighborhood electric vehicle.
And while it’s a shame that the advancements in technology that were incubating in Long Beach in the ‘50s were overlooked when it came time to resurrect the electric car in 1996, ultimately, the reason why the Autoette failed is because of us: We stopped buying them. In the ‘60s, gas was cheap, and even though an electric vehicle would cost you 3¢ per mile, a gallon of petroleum would only cost you 18¢. For about a thosand dollars more than an Autoette in 1974, one could buy a Ford Mustang II. And a surprising number of people did.
The Spark was still hot as I pulled off the 405 in search of some electricity, the unforgiving California sun reflecting off the car’s plastic “chrome” grille, five miles remaining in the battery’s reserve. GM included a smartphone in the car’s glovebox —an important feature, as the phone featured an app showing the locations of all the electric charging stations in Los Angeles. I picked a public charger in a small neighborhood of warehouses and nudged the car tentatively forward.
Twenty minutes later, after asking every warehouse employee within a square block where the charging station was located and finding nothing, I realized that barging in to air-conditioned offices looking like disheveled time traveler and mumbling about electric vehicles wasn’t the best way to refuel. One of the warehouses held a collection of vintage motorcycles; the bike shop’s proprietor took pity on me and lent me an extension cord to plug in to the Spark (thank you again, Yoshi!). I was already late for work at the Petersen, but at least these EVs give you the opportunity to meet new friends.
When I walked around the block in search of the elusive public charger, it was behind a locked gate, in front of a defunct business. Hazy visions of a electric-powered future crashed headfirst into today’s reality: the Spark wasn’t charged and it was my fault. I unplugged, said goodbye to Yoshi, and drove off to find the next charging station, which the Chargepoint app showed was in the parking structure of a 24-Hour Fitness. When I arrived, a Tesla was connected to one of the chargers, a brand-new (and decidedly non-EV) BMW 650 convertible was parked churlishly at the other. I left the Spark behind the Bimmer, blocking its exit, called GM and explained where to find their car, handed the keys to a rep from their car delivery service and took a bus to work.
But this wasn’t supposed to be a typical anti-electric tale. This Chevy Spark EV is the first all-electric vehicle built by General Motors since the EV-1, the star of Who Killed the Electric Car? Yet, unlike with the EV-1, GM has no plans to crush these Spark EVs—though they were built primarily to comply with California’s “zero emissions” policies and very likely cost GM more to build than their MSRP, these Chevy EVs can be purchased outright. Even though, at $18,000 (after tax credits), they sell for nearly double the price of the gas-powered Chevy Spark. Though its 90-mile range is still not enough for a proper commute, the direction of the future is still electric. The Spark EV may have left me stranded, but the fact that a battery-powered car, packed with heavy airbags and air conditioning, drove through a heat wave at highway speeds in the first place is remarkable. GM is a different company these days, and not just because of their bankruptcy. Times are changing when Shad Balch, GM’s EV evangelist, can tweet something like this:
Car companies ultimately serve the car-buying public, and if we vote with our dollars, we can send a message that electric vehicles are worth all that money manufacturers invest in research and development.
If we don’t? Well, there’s already a model for that scenario: The electric car revolution of the early 21st century will be soon forgotten, relegated to the history books, in wait of the next Robert Tafel, the next Newton Blood, the next Royce Seevers.
As I was writing this piece, the man who many regard as the father of this generation of electric vehicles, Elon Musk, decided to remove a few barriers to entry for the electric vehicle by opening up all of Tesla’s patents. This move shows that Musk, like Newton Blood, appreciates that EV manufacturers can either choose to band together or become history separately. Also, an easy P.R. move—it doesn’t appear that Musk has awoken a sleepy wave of indie neo-EV developers just yet. But, who knows — as with any form of technological device these days, it always pays to wait.
And what of Long Beach — that lovely city by the port? Well, the city’s tradition of auto ambivalence has extended even to its most-viewed sporting event, the Long Beach Grand Prix. Locals say that the Formula-1 cars are a nuisance, their 15,000 RPM engines deemed ‘too loud.’ But, next year, Long Beach will host the west coast’s inaugural race of Formula-E, and drivers from nine countries will quietly fling themselves around the sloping bends of Shoreline Drive one week prior to the petrolium-powered F-1 race in all-electric racing cars. Fans will delight at cars built by Spark-Renault to drive a maximum of 150 m.p.h., cantankerous locals will no longer need to complain about the “roar by the shore.” Now, that’s progress.
This article would not have been possible without Larry Fisher. If you are looking for the first, best, and (sometimes) only source of info on the NEV, head to: www.autoette.blogspot.com
