History of the electric car
Daniel Murphy
For most of you environmentalists reading this, driving your own car at all probably seems like an unideal solution to your transport woes. While buses, trains and bikes are greener ways to get around, sometimes it’s just more practical & appropriate to drive your own car. So what’s the solution to this moral quandary, this catch-22? An electric car of course! Charging ports for electric cars are popping up in every city & town in modern Ireland, and electric cars are a modern solution to a modern problem…right?
The first production automobile, one to use an internal combustion engine, is generally considered to be Karl Benz’s Benz Patent-Motorwagen, which was released in 1886. It was a three-wheeled car with a rear-mounted engine. The car ran on Ligroin, a petroleum-based fuel, and received much publicity when Benz’s wife Bertha, whose dowry paid for the invention of the car, took the car (supposedly without her husband’s permission) on a long-distance drive in 1888. She acted as her own mechanic on the drive, and invented many standard features of a car along the way. Between 1886 and 1893 around 25 of the Patent-Motorwagens were built.
While we think of electricity, and thus electric vehicles, as a modern concept, the first viable electric production car was built by Thomas Parker in London in 1884, predating the Benz Patent-Motorwagen by two years. Parker was concerned the effect smoke and pollution was having on London, and was involved with electrifying the London Underground and the trams in Liverpool & Birmingham. Electric cars were most popular at the turn of the century in the UK, France and Germany, with the Flocken Elektrowagen proving popular on the continent. The first (practical) electric car produced in the United States was a six passenger wagon invented by William Morrison in 1891. Electric vehicles didn’t capture the public consciousness in the States until the introduction of A.L. Ryker’s electric tricycles in 1895.
Electric vehicles experienced their first ‘golden age’ at the turn of the century, and though this ‘age’ lasted just 20 or so years its importance to the history of automobiles is worth noting. Electric cabs were introduced in London in 1897 and New York in 1899. Electric cars were favoured over their gasoline-fueled competitors because of the lack of smell, vibration and noise associated with petrol cars. Electric cars, for a time, also didn’t have the same difficult start-up mechanism of petrol ones, which required someone to turn a hand-crank to operate. Stumbling blocks for the electric cars at the time were mainly societal: because of the comparatively easy way to operate them, they were considered cars ‘for women’, which carried an incredibly negative connotation at the time, and as women’s property & employment rights weren’t very strong in the 1910s, sales weren’t great. A lack of power infrastructure hampered their acceptance, but by the mid-1910s most homes in Europe and the States were wired for electricity.
Electric cars began to decline by the 1920s, as improved infrastructure meant people wanted to travel further and for longer than electric cars allowed. Discoveries of large petroleum deposits meant the costs for driving petrol cars for longer & further were much lower, and the journeys were generally more convenient. Electric cars were generally limited to travelling at 20mph max, and to travel long distances you would have to have a car with an exchangeable battery. A lot of electric car models were built with ornate carriages, and were aimed at the wealthy upper classes. This cost, combined with the relatively high cost of use & upkeep, limited the marketability of the electric car heading into the 1920s. Several technical upgrades lead to the petrol automobile overtaking the electric car: in 1912 Charles Kettering invented the electric starter, which did away with all that pesky crank-turning. The further development of the muffler (initially invented in 1897 by Hiram Percy Maxim) deafened the noise pollution aspect of the petrol car, and the introduction of mass production of gas-powered cars by Henry Ford cut the price for those cars in half. By the end of the 1920s most manufacturing of electric cars had finished, with the industry virtually disappearing.
For the next few decades electric vehicles all but vanished, only surviving in the form of some forklifts, milk floats and golf carts. There was a revival of interest in electric cars, but only concept cars & limited-run production cars were made. In 1971 the electric car had the distinction of being the first piloted vehicle driven on the moon, as an electric ‘moon buggy’ produced by Boeing and GM’s Delco Electronics was used in the Apollo 15 mission. The 1973 Oil Crisis, which lead to prices for gasoline & petrol rising to astronomical heights (and scarce availability), caused some to think the electric car was a way to avoid being bound to the ever fluctuating fuel reserves, but no real research materialised until the 1990s, a full century after the first production electric cars were invented.
Renewed interest in low and no emission vehicles rose in the 90s, but they were still mostly limited to short-distance journeys, so popularity dipped again by the close of the millennium. In 2004 Tesla began production on the Tesla Roadster, which they sold until 2012. The success of Tesla electric cars in America and the Mitsubishi i-MiEV in Japan and in Europe (rebadged) in the 2010s lead to other manufacturers like Ford, GM, Toyota, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz and more to consider producing partially or fully electric car models.
At the beginning of 2018 a chief executive of Toyota Ireland said they predict that sales of hybrid cars will overtake diesel ones by 2020. Electric cars can drive as far and as fast as their petrol counterparts, and with charging stations becoming more common even in Ireland, they are now legitimate alternatives to the gas-guzzling petrol cars we’ve been landed with so far. Let’s hope the golden age lasts longer than 20 years this time, eh?
