On the Long History of the Electric Car
I grew up in the eighties and nineties. I’ve never owned a car myself, but as a kid, I was really into them. Sports cars especially. There were some that were cultural icons. There was the Ferrari Testarossa, the Lamborghini Countach, the Porche 911… I had a distant relative who owned a Testarossa. When it showed up, the kids would gather around to marvel at it. I even sat in it once. It was a big deal for 12-year-old me.
What you didn’t have back then was worries about emissions and pollution, so there was no downside apart from the speed limits that kept you from experiencing the car’s potential. Those same limits made it seem a bit silly to drive a car like that just to get around, but it was cool all the same. From the low rumble of a powerful engine idling to the threatening growl when more fuel is fed to burn, to the scream of many thousands of explosions per minute when going full-on, all of it exudes a predatory power.
In those days the idea of an electric car seemed domesticated in comparison. Electric motors were what you had in your blender and in your washing machine. You could imagine it being put into a car, but imagining that car next to a Testarossa seemed silly at best, like it wouldn’t be a real car, more like a washing machine on wheels or a golf cart with pretensions.
The Tesla Motors company can take a lot of the credit for changing that image. These days you can watch videos on Youtube where a 1000 horsepower Tesla S Plaid faces off against jacked-up drag racing muscle cars. But also outside of Tesla, in recent years, there have been a lot of concept cars and motorcycles built that have been drastically changing the image of electric propulsion. Now that the engineers have gotten serious about it, electric cars (EVs) seem well on their way to leaving combustion in a dust pit it won’t crawl out of. Just have a look at this video from 4 years ago. Or read this article by Will Lockett on the Estrema Fulminea.
The Fulminea is a two-seater hypercar with a 100 kWh hybrid battery pack comprised of solid-state batteries and ultracapacitors. This cutting edge pack gives the car 2,040 horsepower, a range of 323 miles and a 0–200 mph in under 10 seconds. For some comparison the Bugatti Chiron, one of the fastest cars around, can do 0–200 mph in 15.7 seconds.
There’s been plenty of Elon bashing recently. If that somehow passed you by and you’re still convinced he’s an actual genius, you can watch these: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This text is not that, I promise, mostly.
I think the bashing is partly a reaction to all the myth-making and hero-worship narratives created around him. That stuff invites scrutiny. Under scrutiny a lot of shit surfaces. I’m not sure how the idea that Elon invented the electric car spread so much. It will have something to do with the fact that electric cars were barely present in popular consciousness before Tesla Motors made the idea into the hot new thing by making a roadster.
I saw a video where Jordan Peterson was talking about Elon Musk. Jordan is really into the whole Hero’s Journey mythology stuff and it seems he considers Elon to be an embodiment of that, adding to the myth-making surrounding him. He said:
You know, you see someone like Elon Musk, I mean, what the hell do you make of someone like that? You know, I mean, what did he do? He made an electric car, which is basically impossible, and it works, which is basically impossible. And then he built an infrastructure, so that you could charge the damn thing wherever you drove, and that was basically impossible. And then he made it cheap, because if you buy an electric car and you factor in the price of gas, the electric car is actually about as expensive as the gasoline car. And so that was unbelievable. And then he built a bloody rocket. (…)
It goes on like that for a while. It’s got over 300000 views at the time of writing, with the comments divided. The majority glowing about how wonderful these 2 human beings are, and the rest treating it like a stand-up comedy routine. I’m in the second category. If taken seriously, it becomes a bit baffling why someone would think as Jordan does here. I suppose, as is often the case, he simply didn’t do his homework.
First of all, even though he calls himself “chief engineer” Elon is not actually an engineer. He didn’t make an electric car. Tesla Motors was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, and they were behind the creation of the roadster. Musk was an early investor who later took control of both the company and the narrative. He’s been successfully attracting talent and has been taking credit for what the engineers have created ever since.
Secondly, they are not cheap, even factoring gas prices (electricity isn’t free either), and prices are rising because demand outstrips production capacity. The cheapest Tesla in 2022 costs 45000 dollars and they go up to 150000. Repair prices often don’t compare to those of gasoline cars. A guy in Finland just blew up his Tesla with explosives in protest because he didn’t want to pay the 22000 dollars they demanded for the replacement of his malfunctioning battery system.
But thirdly, why would it be ‘basically impossible’ to build an electric car? You can just start with conventional car technology and simply replace the engine with an electric one. This was done a number of times during the 20th century. Do people like Jordan think you can’t have electric cars without having AI and self-driving technology? That just seems silly. There’s really no need for any of that. You don’t even need computers. Sure, the most advanced electric cars are very different from gasoline cars. In some Teslas, the base of the car is basically the big battery system and all 4 wheels have separate computer-driven electric motors with data coming from sensors all over the damn thing, but none of this is a necessity for having a functional EV.
Electric motors have been around since the early nineteenth century. It didn’t take people long to figure out you could probably build a horseless carriage that’s powered by one. The first one on record was built in the eighteen thirties. Although more of a curiosity and never put into production, it predated the first gasoline car by half a century. By the end of that century, there were a bunch of different brands building them and they were pretty popular among the elites who could afford them.
It seems the reason the early EVs disappeared is simply that they got out got out-competed. It took a lot less time to fuel a gasoline car than it did to charge batteries. Also, the production costs for the internal combustion cars dropped with mass production. Ford’s assembly line made them a fair bit cheaper than they had been before, bringing them within the budget range of a lot more people. Another factor was that you couldn’t take the electric car very far away from town because that’s where charging stations were, so trips to the countryside were not an option. And the thing that sealed it, apparently, was the invention of electric starters, as the old hand cranking of the axle in the gasoline and diesel engines had been a nuisance.
Electric cars kept being created, but they couldn’t compete. The costs were way higher than for gasoline cars and battery technology was pretty much stagnant, so while combustion cars became more and more powerful, with the price dropping, electric cars’ limited speeds, ranges, and high costs stayed pretty much the same. By the time the second world war came around the story was over.
In the second half of the 20th century now and then a concept car was created, but they all had the same drawbacks: limited speed and range because of crap battery technology, and high costs. They never had the potential to compete with internal combustion cars. The only ones that got some production and use were these little fuckers that were built during the oil embargo in the seventies. They made 4444 of them and targeted them for short-range city usage.
The next wave was at the end of the twentieth century. A documentary called ‘Who Killed the Electric Car’ tells the story of what happened. After a zero-emissions vehicle mandate was passed in California in 1990, the main car manufacturers developed electric cars in response. They didn’t want to sell them, but they were made available for leasing. When the mandate was canceled after intense campaigning by the car companies and the fossil fuel companies, so were the cars. All of them were recalled and destroyed. Perfectly functional EVs were all crushed into blocks of scrap metal. If GM had stuck with it and kept developing the technology, they would have had a massive head start over Tesla, but they decided to suppress the technology and focus on the Hummer instead, which they did successfully.
When you learn about the long history of EVs, we’re left to wonder why there haven’t been more of them, why so little effort was made to develop the technology further, and why so few know about the ones that did exist. It’s like they’ve been largely written out of history. If you’d ask people who they think invented the automobile most would probably answer it was Ford, even though there were EVs decades earlier. I believe it’s the usual story, there was just too much money to be made with oil. The car companies were in league with the fossil fuel companies and none of them wanted this competing technology to exist, and if it had to exist, ideally people wouldn’t know about it or at the very least think it wouldn’t work or wouldn’t be able to satisfy our needs.
There are a lot of stories of new initiatives and advances being bought up just to be shut down and have the tech buried. The documentary talks about a battery developer whose invention was bought up specifically so that it would not be used or be available to others. The General Motors streetcar conspiracy is the messy story of GM and some other companies buying up streetcar city rail and other public transport systems only to dismantle them a few years later. They deny that this dismantling was the goal from the start but no one can deny it looks dodgy as hell. Here’s a video about the efforts that were made to make the US as car-dependent as possible. There are big campaigns even now to block the development of charging station infrastructure in the US.
Groups backed by industry giants like Exxon Mobil and the Koch empire are waging a state-by-state, multimillion-dollar battle to squelch utilities’ plans to build charging stations across the country.
I think the only reason so many car companies have changed their tune and are now investing heavily in electric vehicle technology is to keep from being left behind and becoming irrelevant.
An argument can be made that it took the development of lithium battery technology for electric cars to get past the range and power limitations of the experiments of the twentieth century. The latest battery advances have them going 1200 km on a single charge, so those concerns seem to be a thing of the past, only to be replaced by concerns about the massive, and massively harmful, mining operations that are necessary to make the EV revolution possible — an environmental destructiveness that makes nonsense of the claim that electric cars are a sustainable solution that will help keep our planet livable.
Tesla does not specify the exact quantities of raw materials in its batteries. However, lithium ion batteries with a capacity of 50 kVh commonly used in vehicles such as Tesla’s “mid-range” Model E (starting price around €42,900!) typically contain around 32 kg of nickel, 11 kg of cobalt, 10 kg of manganese, 6 kg of lithium and over 50 kg of graphite. The car, which weighs in at 1,847 kg, also contains steel, aluminum, copper and plastics, as well as rare earths such as neodymium.
All of these raw materials, which can be found in various locations around the world, have to be mined, transported and processed into battery cells and other parts. All of the production steps require enormous amounts of water and energy, especially oil and electricity. The production also results in huge amounts of toxic tailings, waste and sewage.
What we really need instead, in my opinion, is broad investment in the fossil-fuel-free public transport systems of the future. The current electric car revolution is more about the hope, in the face of climate change, that we can mostly keep going with business as usual if we just change a few things. Like we’d be able to stave off climate catastrophe if we just insulate our houses a bit better, get some more windmills and solar panels, and replace combustion engines with electric ones, and so on. These things that are touted as solutions have a nice time in the sun these days because they’re easy to digest, because they’re better than the fossil fuel alternatives and because they don’t challenge the status quo. If you can afford it, it’s not inconvenient to switch to a different type of car. They become a symbol of sustainability, a symbol of the future. That’s pretty good marketing don’t you think? You can help make a difference by buying a nicer car than you’ve ever owned. At the same time, your conscience is satisfied and you can safely ignore the looming catastrophe because you’re doing your part for both the environment and the economy. If only. Here’s an article on the spiraling environmental cost of our lithium battery addiction.
And to conclude, here’s a meme I saw a couple of days ago that puts it succinctly:
If you’d like a step-by-step history with pictures you can have a look at this article, which I used as a source:
Worth the Watt: A Brief History of the Electric Car, 1830 to Present