Let's go, Electrobats!

I've never driven a hybrid, let alone a full EV (electric vehicle), but the automotive world seems to be going in that direction, so I suppose at some point I will. It'll be interesting to see how this all works out - especially for urban dwellers who park wherever they can find a spot on the street. How will they run a cord into their apartment? Or will every street parking space, every garage space, be equipped to juice? Maybe the EVs will have solar panels on their roofs, or spoilers that capture wind power. Maybe they'll come up with a way to charge vehicle batteries really fast. You'll drive into a service station - which, come to think of it, was what we called gas stations back in the day - and instead of fill 'er up, it'll e charge 'er up.

And while they're coming up with better ways to charge EVs, they'll also be coming up with better ways to alert pedestrians that they're coming. We're used to the warning noise of the internal combustion engine. We'll need to know whether something's coming when we step off the curb without looking!

Anyway, the latest "news" about EVs that I read is interesting because it's really not news at all. Other than being news to me. Which was that, when the auto industry started out, a lot of the cars were electric. 

In 1897, the bestselling car in the US was an electric vehicle: the Pope Manufacturing Company’s Columbia Motor Carriage. Electric models were outselling steam- and petrol-powered ones. By 1900, sales of steam vehicles had taken a narrow lead: that year, 1,681 steam vehicles, 1,575 electric vehicles and 936 petrol-powered vehicles were sold. Only with the launch of the Olds Motor Works’ Curved Dash Oldsmobile in 1903 did petrol-powered vehicles take the lead for the first time. (Source: The Guardian)

Oh, those Merry Oldsmobiles!

Then there was the Electrobat, "an electric taxicab that briefly flourished in the late 1890s." Electrobat began as a cab service in New York, and was working out the kinks, like how short the battery life was and how long it took to recharge. Sound familiar? Their solution was a bit unwieldy. It was swapping out the battery every few hours. While the Electrobat tried to figure things out, NYC financier William Whitney decided to invest in scale operations. So he "teamed up with Pope, maker of the bestselling Columbia electric vehicle."

They formed a new venture called the Electric Vehicle Company, and embarked on an ambitious expansion plan. EVC raised capital to build thousands of electric cabs and opened offices in Boston, Chicago, New Jersey and Newport. In 1899 it was briefly the largest automobile manufacturer in the US.

And it's a shame that the Electrobat's flourish was so brief. For one, if the Electrobat/EVC had succeeded, we might not be facing the same degree of environmental destruction that's been wrought by our super-reliance on fossil fuels. Plus we'd perhaps have a great name for cars, for surely the EVC that was begat by Electrobat would have come up with the name Batmobile.

Alas, EVC got caught up in mismanagement and even a swindle.

The industry journal the Horseless Age, a strong advocate of petrol-powered vehicles, attacked the firm as a would-be monopolist and said electric vehicles were doomed to fail. When news emerged that EVC had obtained a loan fraudulently, its share price plunged from $30 to $0.75, forcing the firm to start closing its regional offices. The Horseless Age savoured its collapse and cheered its failure to “force” electric vehicles on a “credulous world”.

Looks like the fossil fuel industry hasn't changed its stripes any. Sure, having horseless carriages had one good result: city streets were no longer clogged with ghastly amounts of horse manure. But:

The switch from horses to cars was not the neat and timely technological solution that it might seem, because cars changed the world in all kinds of unanticipated ways – from the geography of cities to the geopolitics of oil – and created many problems of their own.

That switch to "petrol-powered" turned out to be a case of unintended consequences, consequences that we're mightily struggling with today. 

Electric vehicles managed to hang on for a while after the collapse of EVC. (So long, Electrobat.) But they did so because they were positioned as cars for women.

This association arose because they were suitable for short, local trips, did not require hand cranking to start or gear shifting to operate, and were extremely reliable by virtue of their simple design. As an advertisement for Babcock Electric vehicles put it in 1910, “She who drives a Babcock Electric has nothing to fear”. The implication was that women, unable to cope with the complexities of driving and maintaining petrol vehicles, should buy electric vehicles instead. Men, by contrast, were assumed to be more capable mechanics, for whom greater complexity and lower reliability were prices worth paying for powerful, manly petrol vehicles with superior performance and range.

Even Henry Ford's wife drove an EV. And at one point, For joined forces with Thomas Edison to develop an electric car. 

But the car was repeatedly delayed, as Edison tried and failed to develop an alternative to the heavy, bulky lead-acid batteries used to power electric cars. Eventually, the entire project was quietly abandoned.

I wonder if it's still the case that men prefer the noise-making F150 to a gently purring Prius?

If so, let's get the same type of marketers who were able to shift Marlboro cigarettes from a "ladies' brand" to a John Wayne, macho-man best seller. 

It can't happen soon enough. Cars and trucks account for 17% of overall global carbon dioxide emissions. 

Let's go, Electrobats of the future!