The surprisingly long history of electric cars Daniel Sperling and Gil Tal
If you were buying a car in 1899,
you would’ve had three major
options to choose from.
You could buy a steam-powered car.
Typically relying on gas-powered boilers,
these could drive as far as you wanted—
provided you also wanted to lug
around extra water to refuel
and didn’t mind waiting 30 minutes
for your engine to heat up.
Alternatively, you could buy
a car powered by gasoline.
However, the internal combustion engines
in these models
required dangerous hand-cranking to start
and emitted loud noises
and foul-smelling exhaust while driving.
So your best bet was probably
option number three:
a battery-powered electric vehicle.
These cars were quick to start,
clean and quiet to run,
and if you lived somewhere with access
to electricity,
easy to refuel overnight.
If this seems like an easy choice,
you’re not alone.
By the end of the 19th century,
nearly 40% of American cars were electric.
In cities with early electric systems,
battery-powered cars were
a popular and reliable alternative
to their occasionally explosive
competitors.
But electric vehicles had one
major problem—
batteries.
Early car batteries were expensive
and inefficient.
Many inventors, including Thomas Edison,
tried to build batteries
that stored more electricity.
Others even built exchange stations
in urban areas to swap out dead batteries
for charged ones.
But these measures weren’t enough to allow
electric vehicles to make long trips.
And at over twice the price
of a gas-powered car,
many couldn’t afford these luxury items.
At the same time, oil discoveries
lowered the price of gasoline,
and new advances made internal combustion
engines more appealing.
Electric starters removed the need
for hand-cranking,
mufflers made engines quieter and
rubber engine mounts reduced vibration.
In 1908, Ford released the Model T;
a cheap, high-quality gas-powered car
that captured the public imagination.
By 1915, the percentage of electric cars
on the road had plummeted.
For the next 55 years, internal combustion
engines ruled the roads.
Aside from some special-purpose vehicles,
electric cars were nowhere to be found.
However, in the 1970s,
the tide began to turn.
US concerns about oil availability renewed
interest in alternative energy sources.
And studies in the 1980s linking
car emissions with smog
in cities like Los Angeles
encouraged governments
and environmental organizations
to reconsider electric vehicles.
At this point, car companies had spent
decades
investing in internal combustion engines
without devoting any resources
to solving the century-old
battery problem.
But other companies were developing
increasingly efficient batteries
to power a new wave
of portable electronics.
By the 1990s, energy dense nickel metal
hydride batteries were on the market,
soon followed by lithium-ion batteries.
Alongside regulatory mandates
by California to reduce smog,
these innovations sparked a small wave
of new electric vehicles,
including hybrid cars.
Hybrids aren’t true electric vehicles;
their nickel metal hydride batteries
are only used to optimize
the efficiency of gas-burning engines.
But in 2008, Tesla Motors went further,
grabbing the attention of consumers,
automakers, and regulators
with its lithium-ion-powered Roadster.
This purely electric vehicle could travel
more than 320 kilometers
on a single charge,
almost doubling the previous record.
Since then, electric vehicles have
vastly improved in cost, performance,
efficiency, and availability.
They can accelerate much faster
than gas-powered sports cars,
and while some models still
have a high upfront cost,
they reliably save their drivers money
in the long run.
As governments around the world focus
on slowing climate change,
electric vehicles are now expected
to replace gas-powered ones altogether.
In Norway, 75% of car sales in 2020
were plug-in electric vehicles.
And policies such as California’s
Zero Emission Vehicle mandate
and Europe’s aggressive
CO2 emission standards
have dramatically slowed investments
in gas-powered vehicles worldwide.
Soon, electric cars will reclaim
their place on the road,
putting gasoline in our rearview.