The Ambivalent Progress of Electric Car Technology

With all the attention paid in recent years by both automobile manufacturers and the driving public to the evolution of hybrid and all-electric cars, one would get the impression that this idea was a relatively new thing. It is far from it. Vehicles powered by stored electricity (charging and recharging batteries of one type or another) have been around for nearly 200 years! The ambivalence of the auto industry seems to have succeeded in keeping things moving very slowly.

After a rather successful surge of popularity in the early part of the 20^th Century, the idea fell into a kind of obscurity that was deliberately cultivated, to be sure, by the petroleum industry. Renewed interest has bloomed anew as concerns about petroleum costs and environmental consequences of internal combustion engines have become active concerns of the general driving public.

Electric vehicles have been around for a lot longer than many people realize. As far back as the 1830s, Dutch inventor Sibrandus Stratingh created an "electromagnetic cart" that was useful for short distance utility work. Electric vehicles had become so popular by the early 20^th Century that even Henry Ford's wife, Clara, drove one - A 1914 Detroit Electric which she abandoned as soon as Henry began mass producing gasoline powered cars.

In those days, many of the electric vehicles on the market could get 60-80 miles on a charge. They were slower than gas-powered cars and ran at about 15 MPH but were perfect, in those days, for getting around town. They were not cheap and the working-class could not, as a rule, afford them. But a functional version of the technology was on the scene and had a promising future until the idea fell out (or was advertised out) of popular awareness through the 1930's.

In this era of renewed interest in electrically powered vehicles, it is striking that while many of the world's major auto makers has introduce or is on the verge of introducing a fully electric car, the advertised driving range of them is 35-60 miles on a charge. More highly developed battery systems, including the Li-Ion type currently being further developed, seem to provide less rather than more storage power than the batteries people regard as 'primitive' that were successfully used a hundred years ago. So the technology seems to have gone a step backward for every step it has gone forward.

In the years between Clara Ford's Detroit Electric and today, we are passing through the era of the hybrid, a vehicle powered by both gasoline/diesel and electricity. Currently, these hybrids are a more functional vehicle that the fully electric ones because their range is so much greater. I expect that until the battery technology is much further advanced, we will see many more hybrids on the road than we will moderately priced all-electrics with limited range or ultra-expensive ones with greater distance capacity.

There have been advances that were abandoned. The most overt example is probably that of GM's EV1. This fully-electric car was made from 1996 - 1999 and leased to about 800 people. It was hugely popular with it's drivers but, bowing to pressure from the gasoline-dependent mainstream auto industry, the cars were brought together and simply destroyed in 2002. The coming GM Chevy "Volt" will be seen as a rather sadly inadequate substitute for what was a very functional electric car.

The unevenness and half-hearted efforts of automakers to design and bring to production an affordable and reliable fully-electric car with an adequate driving range is probably reflective of the industry's ambivalence about the product. The public and federal governments are demanding the development of these vehicles and the auto makers want to be seen as being responsive to that demand.

On the other hand, their entire industry has been geared to and in bed with the petroleum interests for many years. None of the automakers, except for the new ones focused, exclusively, on electric technology (like TESLA) really wants to eliminate the gas-powered automobile or truck. They will likely continue to keep the government and environmentalists off their backs by offering the 'option' of electric vehicles that are built, quite deliberately, as to be underpowered and with insufficient driving range to really compete with their bread and butter gas-powered lines.

There isn't much question but that we have the ability to develop more functional technology to make more affordable and useful electric vehicles, but the primary goal of the auto makers is not and has never been economy or environmental protection. They go, inevitably, where the greatest profits are and so long as that place remains with gas-powered vehicles, the advances in electric car technology will remain restrained, inadequate and fundamentally token.