Early enthusiasm for electric vehicles
Balancing powertrains with values
In 2023, 10% of cars sold in the US were EVs. You might think that EVs are now more popular than ever, but the period when EV enthusiasm hit its peak in the United States is in our distant past. In 1900 about a third of all cars on the road in the United States were electric vehicles. And thanks to some enterprising European inventors, the fastest cars in the world were powered by battery packs. Most famously, on April 29, 1899 Belgian Camille Jenatzy set a new land speed record for automobiles while driving an electric car. He was the first to eclipse 100 km/h in his racer, “La Jamais Contente” (the Never Satisfied).
While internal combustion engine cars are ubiquitous in the US today, at the turn of the 20th century there were three methods of propulsion being experimented with: steam, gasoline, and electricity. Whether one would come to dominate or different groups would adopt different technologies was still up in the air. Different groups with different values were drawn to different technologies. They weighed the features of each and made decisions based on what was most important to them.
Steam powered cars seem pretty anachronistic today, but in the early 1900s they definitely had their proponents for a number of good reasons. First of all their engines generated a large amount of torque. This meant that not only could you accelerate quite quickly, you didn’t need to change gears. They could be fast too. After several years of electric vehicles holding the land speed record, in 1902 Frenchman Léon Serpollet became the first person to drive over 75 mph in his steam powered Oeuf de Pâques. Four years later American Fred Marriott was the first to break the 200 km/h (127 mph) barrier in the Stanley Rocket.* The Stanley Motor Carriage Company went on to sell steam powered cars across the US.
There were a few things that bothered a lot of potential consumers, though. It took a fair amount of time to get the boiler up to the temperature needed. Some estimates I’ve seen suggest you could do it in 20 minutes. Others claim as much as 45 minutes. And since you are constantly turning water into steam, you have to refill your water tank pretty frequently – somewhere around every 40 miles. So you had to plan ahead if you were going to use a steam powered car.
Gasoline powered cars at the time were pretty reliable. They had more components than steam powered cars, but you didn’t have to worry about a boiler exploding. And they had a pretty good range. You didn’t need to stop for water every 40 miles and as long as you had access to gasoline, you could quickly refill them and keep cruising. They did belch out black smoke but it dissipated pretty quickly.
One of the biggest concerns around early gas cars was that you had to hand crank them to start them. On one hand it seems like a simple process – you just turn a crank on the front of the car to get the engine going. But there were two catches: 1. They took a lot of strength to turn – strength that not every adult wanting to drive a car actually had. And 2. If the engine backfired, which was not at all uncommon, the crank would move violently. If you were lucky, it just pulled the crank handle out of your hand. If you were unlucky (or didn’t plan ahead) the handle could hit you with enough force to shatter bones.
Compared to gasoline and steam cars, electric vehicles were smooth and quiet. They were also simple to start. All you had to do was push a button and the motor would turn on and be ready to go. There was no cranking and no waiting for a boiler to heat up. They didn’t belch out steam or smoke. And if speed was your thing, for a while they were the fastest cars on Earth. As gasoline powered cars became more popular, EV marketers warned that people should not “ride on an explosion,” which is technically what you are doing when you drive an internal combustion engine vehicle.
Then, like now, the major concern with electric cars was range. This was complicated by the fact that there was not a robust network of chargers. But Detroit Electric vehicles were advertised as reliably getting 80 miles on a single charge and some claimed that under ideal conditions they could go significantly farther. If you were focused on drives around town rather than cross-country jaunts, EVs could do the job quite smoothly.
While these three modes of transport coexisted for the first decade of the 20th century, beginning in the second decade gasoline power was increasingly the choice of American car buyers. A number of the things people didn’t like about internal combustion cars were being addressed and they increasingly did the kinds of things that early automobile enthusiasts wanted cars to do.
In 1908 the Ford Motor Company released the Model T and accelerated the process of lowering the cost of gasoline powered cars. For instance, in 1912 a Model T touring car started at $690. If you wanted a Stanley Steamer (Touring Model 71), that would cost you $1800. A Detroit Electric (Clear Vision Brougham) EV would cost $2,600. At about the same time gasoline became cheaper and easier to get. And in 1912 Cadillac introduced a critical new option for gas powered cars – the electric starter. Within a few years most internal combustion cars were equipped with electric starters and that meant that the strength and bravery required for crank starts were no longer necessary.
The electric car did not immediately disappear, however. It aligned well with the values of a specific sub-segment of automobile drivers. Many city drivers thought it was the best choice. And marketers argued that it was the best car for women because it did not require the strength necessary for a crank starter, didn’t leak grease everywhere, and didn’t produce clouds of black smoke.
Detroit Electric, the biggest producer of EVs at the time, had a prosperous business through the 1920s. Both Thomas Edison and Henry Ford famously owned Detroit Electric cars. And while the vast majority of American automobile manufacturers closed during the great depression, Detroit Electric lasted longer than most. It eventually closed its doors in 1939, but not until after it built 13,000 EVs over 22 years.**
Now, as in the early 1900s, there is a process by which the public, corporations, governments, and NGOs are negotiating which automotive technologies best align with the values that they/we want to promote. In the early 20th Century EVs aligned with a lot of values. In the early part of the 21st Century they are increasingly being seen as meeting the needs of our evolving situation.
After a century of dominance, the gasoline powered car is no longer everyone’s favorite. In part this is because it has a number of downsides that simply weren’t recognized 100 years ago. The famous trope goes that in the early 1900s gasoline powered cars eliminated a major source of pollution in city streets – horses. It was seen as much better to produce a little bit of black smoke that dissipated quickly and seemingly disappeared than to have to trudge through piles of horse manure. Today, the accumulation of those little puffs of black smoke have proven to cause a significant harm that many would like to remedy.
The values promoted in the electric vehicles of 100 years ago – smooth, fast driving that is free from oil drips and noxious fumes – are increasingly in demand today. And modern electric vehicles – which are quicker than ever, are equipped with numerous safety devices, and have increasingly long ranges – align with more and more of the hopes and dreams of many people. It may well be, as many EV enthusiasts are predicting, that electric cars will be the choice of more and more consumers in the 21st century. Or it may be that new technologies will capture our imaginations and help us advance values we are not even concerned about today.
*This record held for almost a 100 years. It wasn’t until the British Steam Car Challenge team developed and raced the Inspiration at Edwards Air Force Base in California was Fred Marriott’s record broken.
** That was 2,000 more vehicles than the Stanley company built during its run of steam powered cars.
Thanks for the history lesson. By the way, lots of horse dung on the roads again, now that we have several Amish neighbors.
Enlightening history lesson!