Just saw an ad from 1912 for batteries for electric cars.

[Deep13]

It was an ad in the November 1912 issue of National Geographic for "Exide" batteries for electric cars from a company called The Electric Storage Battery Company in Philadelphia. It compared their batteries to the movement of a watch.

No real point. Just interesting that electric cars apparently existed 99 years ago in sufficient number to warrant an ad in Natty Geo for its batteries.

[Robb]

1. Made me go look it up.

The Electric Storage Battery Company (ESB) was founded near Philadelphia in 1888. Its Chloride Accumulator Battery helped launch the Age of Electricity. The first Exide (Exotic Oxide) battery was marketed in 1900. The growing company patented the tubular plate battery in 1910, and marketed it as Exide Ironclad.

ESB grew dramatically over the years, through product innovation and by expanding the uses for battery power (including separate marketing efforts for automotive and industrial batteries), through purchases of related technology companies such as the General Battery Corporation in 1987, and from numerous corporate changes. ESB eventually became Exide Corporation, which in 1991 sold its industrial battery operations to Yuasa Inc. resulting in the formation of two companies. Exide Corporation (automotive batteries) became a separate, publicly owned company with no further ties to EnerSys. Yuasa-Exide, Inc. (all industrial battery lines, including motive power) was owned by Yuasa Inc. As the final evolutionary step, Yuasa-Exide, Inc., changed its name to Yuasa Inc, in 1998 and finally to EnerSys Inc. in 2000.

In March, 2002, EnerSys finalized its acquisition of the Energy Storage products group of Invensys plc., headquartered in Chippenham, England, making it one of the largest battery manufacturers in the world. They operate 19 manufacturing and assembly facilities worldwide, with customers in over 100 countries. EnerSys maintains its worldwide headquarters in Reading, Pennsylvania, USA with divisional headquarters in Europe and Asia.

http://www.scripophily.net/elstbaconewj.html

Edited to add:

[Springer9]

2. Baker Electric Car. Jay Leno has one

http://visforvoltage.org/forum/2176-100-year-old-electric-car

http://www.jaylenosgarage.com/

[txlibdem]

14. I thought he had more than one old electric car

Jay is a car enthusiast and has all kinds of cars. He has one that runs off a steam engine IIRC. Well, he has the money for it so why not.

[mrcheerful]

3. BMW built a all wheel drive electric car around the same time, then there was the

Stanley Steamer that run on steam and if I remember right it had low emissions when compared to gasoline engines. The BMW was kind of cool because the electric engines were mounted to the wheels, the problem seems to be that people didn't like them because they were hard to repair for the average 4th grade grads of the time. People today don't realize that the majority of the working class had little to no education, by the 1950's most auto workers had an 8th grade eduction, it wasn't until the late 50's early 60's that workers started thinking education was a good ideal and now look at what is going on with the GOP attacks on education, in the past education was for the elite upper class.

[valerief]

4. Tells all about it in this documentary

http://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/

OIL

[jwirr]

5. If we had continued to build those cars wouldn't we have more nuke

plants now?

[GKirk]

6. I didn't expect Debbie Downer to chime in...

...way to find the bad side of an issue.

[jwirr]

10. Reality sucks.

[anthroman]

7. Tesla

invented a radio-controlled system also, there is film of him with an R/C boat. Like 1905. Of course, its NOT the GOP that is not teaching American technological history, or history in general. I never learned ANY of this stuff, even in private school.

[Terry in Austin]

8. Early work on electric car batteries

By 1909, Thomas Edison had developed a very robust nickel-iron battery, convinced that the future of cars was electric:

The Edison battery extended the range of electric vehicles to as much as 100 miles between charges and had a higher power density that did lead-acid batteries. Also, it was lighter than equivalent lead-acid batteries and could be recharged in half the time, resisted decomposition, was virtually completely reversible, and lasted three to tentimes longer than lead-acid batteries.

More on Edison's EV exploits here:

Thomas Edison inspects electric car in 1914. He and Henry Ford had planned to use Edison's nickel iron battery to power clean, efficient, affordable cars for the masses that would be recharged by home wind turbines...

and here:

His batteries have stood the test of time, and proved to have legendary durability. These cells are not harmed even by flat discharging, nor over charging, and cells of more than 50 years of use often still functioned at full capacity. (Read More)

The road not traveled... (*sigh*)

[truedelphi]

9. Very interesting topic and discussion

I know one reason that the switch to gasoline-based engines was made is because during the nineteen teens, we had so much "Black Gold" available that no one knew what to do with it!

Even when my generation started to drive in the Sixties, gas was under thirty five cents a gallon.

I guess hind sight is always twenty twenty, isn't it?

[TheWraith]

11. Actually no--the change was made because the range of electric cars was far less than gas.

The battery technology of the day was less even than what we would get today out of cars driven by lead-acid batteries, and electricity was harder to transport to rural areas than gasoline.

[Deep13]

13. I'm wondering if WWI helped kill the electric car.

With factories cranking out gasoline vehicles for the war effort, I wonder if electric cars just got buried.

[txlibdem]

12. Electric cars were far superior to internal combustion engine cars at that time

Gas cars were VERY unreliable. It was common for people to yell, "Get a horse!" at motorists stranded by a disabled gas powered car.

What we now know as the Big Three auto makers poured extreme amounts of engineering effort toward making gas cars reliable enough to fool the public but even with the invention of the electric starter (for gas cars, which removed the need to hand crank the engine to start it) the electric vehicles of the day were still far more reliable.

Had we put as much money into grid reliability and battery technology as they did with the gas cars, history could easily have played out completely differently.