EV Revolution: 100+ years of the electric car

The search for a power source with no downsides has been under way forever. And, with today’s rapid pace of electric vehicle (EV) development, we are making progress. But are we getting closer to the EV with no downsides? We take a look back at a century – and more – of the electric car…

If you thought the electric car (EV) was a purely 21st century phenomenon, you would be deliriously wrong.

The electric car belongs to the very early days of the automobile, when there was no certainty about what form of propulsion – fossil-fuel, steam, electric or some left-field brainwave worthy of Leonardo da Vinci – would ultimately rule the roadways.

It’s not clear who invented the electric car, or exactly when, but it seems it was either American inventor Thomas Davenport, or his Scottish counterpart Robert Anderson; both of whom had operational EVs in the mid-1830s.

Looking back to those early days reveals a few surprises: For example, when the calendar flipped over from 1899 to 1900 to mark the beginning of the 20th century, electricity was a more common form of motor vehicle propulsion in the USA than internal combustion. The big shock today is to learn that at the time it was second, in terms of popularity, to steam power.

That pecking order didn’t last long: If the development of electric cars remained basically static (even though at the turn of century an EV driven by Frenchman Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat held the world land speed record) once the initial foothold had been established, fossil fuel power certainly didn’t. Steam held out a bit longer but it too fell to the superior convenience of petrol or diesel-fired reciprocating engines.

Without thought of failing future oil supplies, or even the anticipation of global environmental impacts, fossil fuel rapidly became the focus of development as demands for long-distance travel, high speeds and ease of refueling became more clamorous.

The infrastructure required to service already range-challenged electric vehicles was not able to keep pace with nation-wide outlets selling cheap fossil fuel – and even if it had, the time taken for a re-charge was prohibitively long, despite some forward-thinking electric vehicle manufacturers devising systems such as fast battery-swap stations.

With this steady shift in car-maker focus and buyer preferences, the electric car and the steam-powered car ground more or less to a silent stop. In terms of EVs, the declining demand made for more expensive manufacture to the point where, in the early 1900s, an EV was priced at close to twice that of a comparable petrol-driven car.

Come the early 1930s and EVs – and steam-powered cars – were practically extinct.

Well, practically extinct: While electric power had long since shifted away from the mainstream as ever more efficient petrol engines dominated the industry and steam migrated to rail transport and industrial use, a fair bit of work was still under way as various organisations, including the American auto leviathans and numerous determined specialist operations, continued searching for ways of making non-polluting and efficient EVs viable once again.

In fact General Motors – largely as a response to the 1990 Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate in the state of California that decreed car-makers must sell increasing percentages of EVs if they were to have a presence in the state – took what looked like a bold step. Partly influenced by the California mandate, and partly by the 1987 success of a GM entrant in the World Solar Challenge in Australia, GM actually developed and built a pure-electric car, the EV1.

It was introduced in 1995 and leased, rather than sold, to customers then returned to GM at the end of the lease. Chrysler, Ford, Honda, Nissan and Toyota were among those that also offered EV conversions of existing models during the period but, like the GM EV1, none of these ultimately came to anything. A lack of re-charging infrastructure, limited range and long delays while recharging the batteries pretty much replicated the woes of much earlier EVs.

The seemingly mythical breakthrough in in the search for a compact, lightweight battery with storage capacity sufficient to challenge the touring range offered by fossil-fueled vehicles was as elusive as ever.

This didn’t mean that, at certain levels, EVs were not still holding some hope for the future, especially after worldwide recognition of the role played by fossil fuel powered cars in global warming.

As other non-polluting technologies – such as hydrogen-powered fuel cells, supercapacitors, compressed air and even water – were being explored, the battery/electric motor concept was far from forgotten.

The big car companies continued EV research and development, as did many smaller players who combined their specialist knowledge with an optimistic view of what they might individually be able to achieve.

As a result of this continuing research, batteries have got smaller, lighter and more efficient in tandem with the increasing ability of host vehicles to squeeze out every last drop of mechanical efficiency.

EVs from large car-makers began reappearing. As industry titans sought to establish a foothold in what they were now coming to see as the future of the automobile, Mitsubishi introduced its i-MiEV in 2010. Nissan’s LEAF EV arrived in 2012, Renault rolled out its Fluence Z.E. and other car-makers including BMW, Volvo, Ford and Smart also unveiled EVs. The race was on.

But it was an American visionary entrepreneur who finally did what others had so far been unable to achieve: A full-size sedan that offered not only high performance backed by capable dynamics, but also a petrol-comparable cruising range.

On the back of a high-performance Roadster model introduced in 2008, the Tesla Motor Company (named in honour of Nikola Tesla, who invented the AC induction motor in 1888) introduced its Model S sedan in 2012, offering stratospheric performance and a claimed cruising range of around 400km. The Model S immediately changed perceptions of what was achievable with existing technology.

That existing technology that was far from new: Surprisingly to some, even the battery types that are so much a point of discussion today have a relatively long history – though not as long as the default lead-acid battery that continues in wide use despite being invented as long ago as the mid-1800s.

Nickel cadmium (NiCad) and lithium-ion (Li-ion) which are both used extensively in today’s hybrid and pure-electric vehicles, have been in technology’s consciousness for 50 or so years. As the industry sought the elusive stored-energy breakthrough, both were being touted as far back as the 1960s as the next big things in battery development.

The breakthrough, as many predicted, hasn’t come in a rush: Although both NiCad and Li-ion tick all the boxes in terms of weight, energy density, size and efficiency, they are still far from perfect in terms of energy density, charge time, weight and size.

The industry still hasn’t given up on the idea of a magic moment for battery design: Even today, various technologies such as (currently) non-rechargeable but long-range aluminum-air are being studied in the hope that they will outdate even Li-ion to replicate, in a way, the enormous advances made in computer technology since the mid-20th century.

We can only be sure of one thing: The cars of the relatively near future will represent a quantum change in what we have come to accept as the norm in the last 100 years or so of motor vehicle technology.

And a question comes to mind: If electric propulsion isn’t new and has taken more than a century to become once again viable, does that mean steam, which was once the most popular method in the USA of delivering power to an automobile, is completely out of the future picture?

Er, probably.