Sierra Mountain Times

A 1905 Woods, 214a Brougham electric car. Curator/photographer: James Cousens.

By Wayne Kirkbride

With spiraling gas prices forcing American families to make tough choices over things such as food, shelter, and other basics, they are looking at all possible ways to save money when it comes to transportation. Some have rediscovered car-pooling, rapid transit systems or just limiting non-essential trips by auto in an effort to save money on gas. Thousands have traded in their SUV’s, or parked them in favor of smaller, more economical cars, especially for commuting to and from work.

Currently, the best performance by cars comes from hybrids – those dual gasoline and electric motor automobiles that produce 40 or more miles per gallon of gas. Toyota leads the way with its popular Prius, but several other makers have added hybrids to their fleet.
The latest buzz from Detroit’s General Motors is an electric car from Chevrolet, which will be called the Volt and will have a rechargeable battery and a small gas tank to extend its range. It should be available in 2010. Ford and Toyota are also tinkering with their versions of electric cars by 2010. Even Hyundai hopes to have a combination propane/electric car available by 2009 in Korea first.

The market-driven incentive to look to the past and re introduce electric cars is a repeat of what has already taken place in this country and around the world. The electric car concept is nothing new as this time line will illustrate.

1839: Robert Anderson of Scotland builds the first, although crude, electric vehicle.
1897: The Pope Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut branches out from bicycles to automobiles and builds about 500 electric cars over a two-year period.
1898: Dr. Ferdinand Porsche of Germany built his first car, the Lohner Electric Chaise. His second car was a hybrid, using an internal combustion engine to spin a generator that provided power to electric motors located in the wheel hubs. On battery alone, the car could travel nearly 40 miles.
1899: Pope Manufacturing and two smaller electric car companies merge and form the Electric Vehicle Company. It thus becomes the first large-scale operation in the US auto industry with assets of $200 million.
1903: The Krieger Company builds a vehicle that uses a gasoline engine to supplement an electric battery pack.
By 1900, the electric car was a reality in America. Of the 4,192 cars produced in the US, 28 percent are powered by electricity, and electric autos represent about one-third of all cars found on the roads of New York City, Boston, and Chicago.
1904: Henry Ford revolutionizes transportation by introducing mass-produced, affordable autos for the common man, and powered by a gasoline engine. Followed by a gas engine self starter, it sounds the death knell for the electric car.
1916: Two prominent electric vehicle makers, Baker of Cleveland and Woods of Chicago, offered hybrid cars. Woods claimed that their hybrid reached a top speed of 35 miles per hour and fuel efficiency of 48 mpg. Being more expensive and less powerful than its gasoline competition, it sold poorly.
Fast forward to 1976 following the gas crisis that came with the oil embargo of 1973. Congress passes a new law to allow more research on hybrid and electric cars.
1977-1979: General Motors spent over $20 million in electric car development and research, reporting that electric vehicles could be in production by the mid-1980s.
1988: General Motors’ research for such a vehicle results in the production of the “EV1”.
1990: California passes its Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate (ZEV’s), which requires two percent of the state’s vehicles to have no emissions by 1998 and 10 percent by 2003. Under political pressure, the law is repeatedly weakened over the next decade to reduce the number of pure ZEV’s it requires.
1993: The Clinton Administration announced a government initiative called the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV). A partnership between the government and the auto industry worked to develop a clean car that could operate at up to 80 miles per gallon. A few years later and a billion dollars, the PNVG emerged with three prototypes, each of which was a hybrid. Toyota was not included in the PNVG program, prompting Toyota to embark on a crash program to develop its own car that would improve fuel efficiency by 50 percent.
1997: Toyota introduces the first Prius to the Japanese market, two years before its original launch date. First year sales were nearly 18,000.
2002: In a suit against the State of California’s Air Resources Board, GM and Daimler-Chrysler, along with the Bush Administration, seek to repeal the ZEV mandate of 1990.
Although several automakers produced a few thousand all electric cars, most of them were available for lease only. By the early 2000s, all of the major automakers’ electric car production is discontinued.
2005: An independent film titled “Who killed the electric car” documents GM impounding 78 EV1’s and having them crushed.

In just a relatively short period, we’ve seen a promising start in the development of electric or hybrid cars abandoned through the forces of market pressure to continue using our century old reliance on the gasoline internal combustion engine. History reflects that same reaction that we face now that the country faced in the 1970s with the oil embargo of that period. Again we are reacting to the dominance that oil has held over us, especially in the area of transportation. American automakers are trying to re-tool to offer fuel-efficient vehicles once more. They are paying the price of having unsold, unwanted vehicles as buyers seek cheaper transportation. They shouldn’t be faulted entirely, though. The American motorist, supported by its government, took a shortsighted view of the future of oil and what it could mean to American consumers when cheap and available oil was no longer there to support the Big Three automakers.