Electric cars, the new age of motoring

When you look around the world at the rising cost of gasoline for vehicles, and consider a potential future oil crisis, you might be relieved that electric vehicles are finally starting to be developed. You might even be thinking, “It’s about time. What took them so long?”

But actually, it didn’t “take them long” at all. Electric vehicles are not, in fact, a new technology that is hurriedly being developed in the nick of time, in response to upcoming peak oil. These vehicles were developed well before the combustion engine rose to the fore; in the family of self-propelled carriages, the electric version is the older sibling, not the younger.

Records are a bit sketchy in many cases, but it’s well-known that the first electric carriage was invented somewhere in the 1830s. Yes, you heard right – as early as 1832 or thereabouts, the Scot, Robert Anderson, created what was very probably the first electric vehicle in the world. And he wasn’t the only one doing this in that decade. In 1835 in the Netherlands, a Professor Sibrandus Stratingh also designed an electric car, which his assistant, Christopher Becker then built.

Hot on the heels of these developments, another Scotsman, Robert Davidson, created a second electric vehicle, with the added advantage that this one used a (non-chargeable) electric cell as a power source. He shared the credit for that innovation with Thomas Davenport who did the same thing in the United States.

So you see that electric cars were well on their way, several decades before any serious development of oil-based vehicles. For most of the 19th century, when it came to self-propelling transportation, the main emphasis was on this type of car. In Britain and France especially, where the governments were on board, these vehicles became quite advanced for their time. It got to the point that speed and distance records were being kept, with the top recorded speed being 65 miles (or 105 kilometers) per hour. So these cars could go close to what people today would regard as highway speed, though undoubtedly they couldn’t run for as long a distance as today’s cars.

Electric vehicles seemed like the future of transportation throughout the 1800s and into the 1900s, with even the United States catching up and taking serious notice by the end of the 19th century. In fact, it was the Americans who established the very first commercial setting for these cars, with the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company of Philadelphia building the first fleet of electric taxis for New York City.

So although combustion vehicles were now on the scene, at the turn of the century the electric cars seemed well on their way to a rosy future. They were cleaner and quieter than gasoline-powered vehicles and didn’t require hand-cranking to get them started. They also didn’t need the long warm-up period that steam-powered vehicles did.

Then the electric starter was invented for the combustion cars, and cheap oil was discovered in Texas. And the rest, as everyone knows, is history. The electric car was shoved aside for many decades. It still carries the distinction, though, of being the older sibling of gas-powered cars, rather than the reverse.

But surely, you think, there’s one development today that really is new – the electric-gasoline hybrid car. However, electric vehicles won the race in that department too.

Ferdinand Porsche designed what was probably the first hybrid car in history, sometime between 1897 and 1899, using a gasoline engine to turn a generator which in turn charged batteries that ran the wheels. Gas-electric vehicles were produced in Germany, the United States, France, and Belgium, through the first two decades of the 20th century. Even in Canada, the Galt Motor Company introduced a genuine hybrid in 1914.

So one might almost consider the combustion engine, powered by cheap oil, to be an aberration, or perhaps an experiment to see if an alternative to electric energy might work better for self-propelled vehicles. These days it’s like people have begun to think, “Well, that experiment didn’t do so well, did it?” and are now returning to the safer and cleaner – and original – method of powering vehicles.