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We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning

215 points by mibzman 7y ago

crimsonalucard 7y ago
If we replaced all cars with EV's how much greenhouse gas would we actually curb? I know we're shifting the strain of the car producing greenhouse gases tp the power plant. Anybody know the numbers? Intuitively I always thought the only way of actually making a dent in emissions is to change the way we live by shifting to public transportation. Suburbia is what makes the US the leading greenhouse gas producers and only changing the way we live to be more like cities such as NYC or Tokyo do we actually stand to make a change. We need to reduce the usage of cars to make a meaningful dent in greenhouse gas emissions.
todd8 7y ago
Perhaps we could have had electric vehicles sooner, but we would have needed clean sources of electricity, not coal powered generation, to make a difference.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Many of the largest early sources of electricity were, in fact, hydro power. We could've just kept building more of those until the mid 20th century when we would've pretty much maxed out the rivers (in the US). And don't forget wind power. Could do that, too. The intermittentness handled in areas by hydro as well. Then nuclear in the mid 20th century.
  - 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
    If we talk about world, not just USA, then many places just don't have the luxury of hydro, or even wind. And often gas needs to be imported making it expensive. Coal was just cheap and effective to begin with.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 7y ago
  No, it would not have been needed because even with coal-generated electricity, EV are cleaner than ICE (because small engine are far less efficient than big power plants). Besides, if all the car were powered by electricity, we probably would have made the electric grid cleaner and switch to renewables far sooner. Because switching from coal to gas and gas to solar/wind would have had a positive impact on almost all types of energy consumption: train, cars, heating, lightning, etc. Instead we had to invest in both the electric grid and ICE to try to make them clean, instead of just the grid.
  - todd8 7y ago
    I don't believe that this is completely accurate. According to the information found on page 7 of Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists [1], an electric vehicle that is charged by electricity from oil or coal generation has overall equivalent emissions to a gasoline vehicle that obtains 29 miles/gallon. Roughly on par with fuel-efficient contemporary gasoline powered vehicles. So I stand by my claim that electric cars don't solve the problem without addressing the emissions due to coal/oil based grid power. In an alternative history, perhaps we could avoid petrochemical power, but it's not clear to me how we would have done that. Ford began production of the Model T in 1908. Solar and wind production would not have been feasible in the early 20th century, and even today hydroelectric power provides only a fraction of our energy consumption. See [2]. With regard to the original article, I find its analysis flawed. As I've already stated, power production for electric vehicles wouldn't have been clean in the early 1900's, but modern clean electric cars depend on more than a power grid based on renewable energy sources. They depend on lithium-ion batteries, invented in 1980. What would the country's electric cars have utilized before the 1980s? (Lead-acid and NiCad have serious environmental impacts, Lead-acid has poor energy vs weight, and NiMH batteries were not invented until 1989. All three of these battery types have charging rate limits that prevent them from being used in practical cars.[3]) Perhaps we could have done much better in the past with our decisions, but "masculine daring-do"[4] isn't the reason that we ended up with the levels of CO2 that we have in the atmosphere today. [1] https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cleaner-Cars-from-Cradle-to-Grave-full-report.pdf https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cl... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/media/File:History_of_energy_consumption_in_the_United_States.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/m... [3] https://phys.org/news/2015-04-history-batteries.html https://phys.org/news/2015-04-history-batteries.html [4] From the original articles sub-title.
thrower123 7y ago
I don't think you can discount the military applications as a factor. It is not as extreme as in aviation in terms of raw innovation, but without the demand for millions of engines for trucks, tanks, jeeps, and all the other machinery of war sparked by the warfare of the first part of the 20th century, the internal combustion engine would not be as ubiquitous as it is today. In thirty years armies went from marching on oats and horseshoes to petrol and Goodyears. Maneuver warfare would have been impossible on electric. And then when the war was over, all that surplus machinery was around, and so were the factories that built it.
- m-i-l 7y ago
  This aligns to the timings of the switch to ICE, which appears to be between 1914 and 1917 - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181692 .
lgleason 7y ago
Battery technology has been, and to a certain degree still is the limiting factor for electric cars...and the fact is that gasoline is still a denser form of energy storage than batteries by volume, weight etc.. I'm saying this as a someone who prefers electrics over ICE...
- Tade0 7y ago
  I think that if, then only in terms of cost. Every quarter or so I do a 1500km(935 mile) trip and back. Nowadays it takes me two days, because I realized that spending around 20h behind the wheel without rest is simply dangerous. My car's highway range is about 440 miles - but I rarely drive that far without refueling because the longest distance between my usual stops is 350 miles. And once stopped I don't just fill up an move along - I stretch my legs, grab something to eat etc. My point being: given that the newest Model S achieves 370 miles and my favourite spots all happen to have superchargers I could probably pull this off in a Tesla adding maybe one stop and one hour to my trip. We're there in terms of range. Now all that is needed is a reduction in cost.
  - emilecantin 7y ago
    I've done a roadtrip from Montreal to Atlanta in a Model S, back in 2015. I've found that by the time the battery runs low, you're due for a break anyway, so it doesn't really change the way you travel that much.
  - Shivetya 7y ago
    1600 round mile trip, give or take. Georgia to Western Ohio then across to Eastern Pennsylvania, relatives in Eastern to North Eastern Ohio but that is an EV desert. I did this within weeks of buying a Model 3 LR. Added about ninety minutes to the 600 mile drive. Three stops. I did ignore the Navigation charge time so I could avoid the SC inside of Cincinnati. If you follow the suggestions of the car and are willing to stop more the charge times are lower. However as I was hoping 190 to 210 at a time and driving the standard speed of I75 at the time I tended to push the charge to 80% or more. Now the reason there is ninety minutes is you need to factor in charging at your destination. Seeing that my relatives had nothing more than standard 120 I was in effect anchored to my closest SC which was thirty six miles away. So at that point I charged to 95% which took longer. They don't live in a small Ohio town but there were only two good chargers, one at Nissan and one at the Ford dealer. Neither is good for a true long range car. After that trip I realized there really is no point in carrying the mobile charge cable. I simply found hotels with nearby SC setups. Do not rely on destination charging as you are just as likely to find "guests" who act as if they own it and hotels are not keen on stepping in. There are times I swear fellow EV drivers are the most entitled pricks I have ever met.
Causality1 7y ago
They could've worked in cities. Lead-acid batteries, though, have never had the energy/weight ratio necessary for the type of long-range driving necessary outside of highly urbanized areas.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Likely if the fossil fuel bonanza had not happened there would have been more interest in improving battery chemistry.
  - Something1234 7y ago
    I would say that fossil fuels are very important for a lot of our battery technology. I believe that a large number of important chemicals and materials like plastics are derived from oil.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      They are important, but not as important as they are to transportation. The quantities of oil required for fuel production dwarf the quantities required for plastics and other important chemicals. It's still a sizeable amount but not even close to what gets burned every day. It's just that fossil oil is - relatively speaking - very cheap compared to other sources.
  - bmurphy1976 7y ago
    Or more public transportation.
- soperj 7y ago
  And we would have all been better off. Cities would have been much more livable, and walkable, and people could commute by train/plane.
  - Causality1 7y ago
    More livable for the urbanites. Everybody else, like my relatives who still live on dirt roads, can go screw themselves apparently.
rb808 7y ago
You can visit Thomas Edison's house with his lab near Newark NJ. There are two electric cars on display. Interestingly here it says in 1914 38% of all the cars on the road were electric; 22% gasoline, 40% steam powered. http://www.edisonmuckers.org/edisons-cars/ http://www.edisonmuckers.org/edisons-cars/
- whenchamenia 7y ago
  Of all the pre-war cars I have been in or around... only steam had the power to throw you back in the seat. It would be interesting to see a modern multifuel interpretation of one. Might be well suited to long runtimes and alternate fuels.
  - mysterydip 7y ago
    Not exactly what you asked for, but have you seen BMW's turbosteamer concept? https://newatlas.com/go/4936/ https://newatlas.com/go/4936/
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - mikepurvis 7y ago
      Ha, I remember reading about that in university. One of the options my group considered for a culminating project in our engineering degree was a 6-stroke rotary (Wankel) engine that would have a water injection phase after the exhaust was pressed out. I don't think manufacturing a working model of such a thing would have been within reach for a couple of undergrads, although the project we went with was almost as ambitious— we ended up building a mostly functional laundry washer from scratch.
    - wukerplank 7y ago
      Woah! Never heard of it. > The long-term development goal is to have a system capable of volume production within ten years. I guess they canned the project?
  - 7y ago
Swizec 7y ago
We also could have had steam powered cars. Jay Leno once said that he got pulled over on the freeway for breaking the speed limit in his Stanley Steamer from 1906-ish. Darn thing has a top speed of 127mph. My 2018 motorcycle tops out at 110mph, to give you a comparison. Why don't we have steam cars? Because in the early 1900's steam cars they couldn't compete with the elegance of ICE vehicles. The engines were big and heavy, the fuel was hard to manage, they took a long time to warm up, etc etc. The internal combustion engine was just a way better tool for the job. Same reason electric cars didn't win: The ICE was just a way better tool for the job at the time. This is now changing, but very slowly. Tesla, for example, still doesn't have an official Nurburgring lap time because it simply isn't able to drive at racing speeds for long enough without the battery overheating and reducing power output to avoid damage. Yes racing electric cars exist and they're awesome, but even Formula E swaps cars in the middle of the race because a single car can't last long enough.[1] It does look like VW's electric supercar currently attacking the Nurburgring lap record. Already holds the absolute record for Pikes Peak. Exciting times we live in :)[2] [1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-time-clocked-in-by-Tesla-Model-S-in-N%C3%BCrburgring https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-time-clocked-in-by-Tesla-M... [2]https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/vws-record-breaking-electric-car-takes-on-worlds-scariest-racetrack-nurburgring/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/vws-record-breaking-ele...
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  There were a few attempts at steam motorcycles/bicycles too - which boggles the mind a bit. Definitely not going to meet modern health and safety. Here's one from 1860: https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/motorcycles/a26052/1860s-vintage-motorcycle/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/motorcycles/a26052/186... Ransomes, famous maker of traction engines and inventor of the powered lawnmower had a couple of patents for steam motorcycles, but I've never seen details of what they envisaged.
- wmf 7y ago
  Isn't the whole point of the article that ICE was not way better and racing is a harmful distraction?
  - 7y ago
egypturnash 7y ago
Hindsight is 20/20.
oblib 7y ago
Early models of Ford's Model T had adjustable carburetors to run on ethanol with gasoline as an option. Not electric, but renewable, sustainable, and I'd assume (maybe wrongly) mostly carbon neutral.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  Everything is "carbon neutral" on a long enough time period. You can make ethanol carbon neutral on a one year time period if you want.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  The problem with ethanol is that the most efficient plants for making it also happen to be food crops.
  - imtringued 7y ago
    No, that's not the problem. The problem is that driving tractors and producing fertilizer requires a lot of fossil fuels.
    - rightbyte 7y ago
      You can run the tractors on ethanol also, though?
  - nickik 7y ago
    That's only an issue if you assume that farm land is a limited resource but that not really the problem in practice. There are no fuel shortages just because you have cars that use ethanol. I'm not a huge fan of ethanol specially not how it was handled in the political process (farm subsides) but using it in general is not a bad idea if it can compete.
- nickik 7y ago
  I think methanol makes far more sense then ethanol. But basically you can cheaply build cars that can run on pretty much anything. It would be easy to require all cars to support everything from M10,E10 to M80,E80 without much issue. I think 20-30 years ago cars should have started requiring cars to support all that stuff and allow competition between the different fuels and different methods of fuel production. Meaning most likely methanol from gas, ethnaol from food or gas from saudi arabia. Methanol from natural gas could have been incredibly successful specially because natural gas export is not an easy problem. Meaning that gas prices in the US were incredibly cheap and a huge fleet of car hungry for methanol would have made it reasonable to do the conversion process. Far less methane could have been wasted into the air. Now I feel like time has passed and EV make more sense.
Animats 7y ago
* But no sudden technological breakthrough explains the automobile’s arrival in the 1890s either.* Er, steel? Steel was about as exotic as titanium is now until the 1860s when the Bessemer process went into volume production.
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  I think steam engines prototyped a lot of the needed technology like lubrication, manufacturing of precision shafts and heat resistance which then could be applied to the gas engine.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    We didn't have "good" machine tooling for mass production of metal parts until the 1880/1890s. The technology existed but it was all exotic and high priced because we just weren't good at making metal stuff.
    - iguy 7y ago
      Depedns on your definitions of "good" and "mass". UK railways crossed 500 million people a year sometime before 1880, and as many journeys as the population sometime in the 1840s. That's sounds like a lot of metal wheels & rails to me, certainly not space-ship exotic. Although of course things continued to grow from there.
      - oblio 7y ago
        > UK railways The keyword being "UK". We can include the US and a bit of Western Europe plus Japan. For much of the world a train was exotic even far into the 20th century.
        TomMarius 7y ago
        Except for China you named most of the world population back then ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_in_1900 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...
8bitsrule 7y ago
Related article (by Alexis Madrigal), "The Electric Taxi Company You Could Have Called in 1900" about an attempt to roll out an electric cab company in NYC and the rest of New England. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/the-electric-taxi-company-you-could-have-called-in-1900/72481/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/the-e... Another article which touches on the subject: https://grist.org/article/2011-03-28-alexis-madrigal-crazy-greentech-history-powering-the-dream/ https://grist.org/article/2011-03-28-alexis-madrigal-crazy-g... "At a time when many people were stuck inside new urban confines, unable to get outside to private spaces, having a car that could tour, a car with a lot of range, was quite appealing.... And it was just sexy to go fast. People like to go fast."
Johnny555 7y ago
Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles, but didn’t give riders the same illusion of freedom and masculine derring-do Isn't that the same reason we still don't all drive electric cars? I was always disappointed that NEV's didn't take off, seems like a perfect solution for cities and even suburbs -- lanes could be striped much narrower and parking could be much more dense. But few people want to drive a glorified golf cart to the office, even if they only drive 10 miles and are stuck in stop and go traffic anyway, so the 25mph NEV cap wouldn't really change their commute time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhood_Electric_Vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhood_Electric_Vehicle
axaxs 7y ago
Unpopular opinion, but I truly feel battery powered cars are a dead end. Gas won out over earlier models because of its unique properties, most of which is its easy availability and high energy density. Batteries are heavy, and range limited. A true successor to the ICE must offer the same freedoms afforded. Whether it's super fast charging, nuclear, or a greener fuel, though, I'm not sure.
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  The 2019 Tesla model S has a range of 370 miles, and I assume that as time passes, more EVs will have a range approaching that figure. That range is considerably longer than the range of my bladder, so once charging increases in speed, this "problem" simply vanishes. We're already on our way there, the first 250kW charger opened this week, and will add 180 miles of range in 15 minutes. In fact, it's better than an ICE car, because I can charge at home, and start every single journey with 100% charge.
  - forkandwait 7y ago
    How long does it take to charge? Granted 350 miles is a long trip, but some 9f us drive from Seattle to San Francisco and we can't do that in 350 burst waiting overnight for the car to charge. Personally I think a hybrid that plugs into 120, with a commuting range 50 miles and a back up gas engine will be the sweet spot
    - emilecantin 7y ago
      Lithium-ion batteries can be fully charged safely in about an hour, give or take, regardless of their capacity. 80% charge is about half that, IIRC. The reason it takes a while to recharge EVs is because of the enormous size of their batteries. Tesla Superchargers inject more power into the car than what comes into a regular home. Quick math: A 100KWh is going to take a bit more than 100KW of power to charge in an hour. For comparison, an oven uses about 3KW...
    - esotericn 7y ago
      You can get back 120 miles of range in 20 minutes. The M3 I believe is even faster. Range is no longer an issue for modern electric vehicles.
jhoechtl 7y ago
Why would we have had electric car from the beginning? Producing an E-car consumes more energy than a car with an internal combustion engine, the milage is a joke. And if electricity is coming from coal power plants it is all but green.
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  > Producing an E-car consumes more energy than a car with an internal combustion engine, That's true! These differences change as soon as the cars are driven. EVs are powered by electricity, which is generally a cleaner energy source than gasoline. Battery electric cars make up for their higher manufacturing emissions within eighteen months of driving — shorter range models can offset the extra emissions within 6 months. Source: https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8 https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8 > the milage is a joke. The 2019 Tesla model S has a range of 370 miles, and on new superchargers will add 180 miles of range in 15 minutes. Source: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/24/new-tesla-model-s-370-miles-of-range-epa-goes-from-bay-area-to-la-on-one-charge-tesla-killer-comparisons/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/24/new-tesla-model-s-370-m... Of course, most EV owners rarely use any charger other than their home one, since you can start every journey with 100% charge. This might be "a joke" to you, I cannot say. > And if electricity is coming from coal power plants it is all but green. That's also true! Lucky then that all electricity does not come from coal power plants. In the US, that's only 17.8%. Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/ Those with solar panels on their homes don't get their power from any kind of power plant at all, just the sun.
adrianmonk 7y ago
> Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles This article talks a lot about cars around 1900. In the US in 1900, 60% of the population lived in rural areas and only 40% lived in cities. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States#Historical_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...) So working well in rural areas was probably a more important concern. A product that works OK for all your potential customers is better (from a business's point of view) than one that works a bit better for some customers and not at all for others.
- sitkack 7y ago
  85% of all the income was probably made in cities.
  - adrianmonk 7y ago
    Valid point. I couldn't easily find data on that, though I do think that at a certain point cars became one of those things you find a way to afford (even if you don't have a lot of money) because of how useful they are if you live in a rural area.
chrisco255 7y ago
It's amusing to see people "Monday morning quarterbacking" on one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. "We could have done it ANOTHER way!" ignores the fact that it might not have happened at all.
chadcmulligan 7y ago
Some of the reasons why petrol won: There was no electric grid to speak of - even now there is concern the grid can't support all EV's, once you were outside the cities (and there weren't many back then) the grid was spotty. The miracle of being able to pour some cheap liquid in an engine and drive for miles is a considerable achievement. Lead acid batteries weren't very good and were expensive (and still are) and don't last long compared to petrol engines. Electric motors were big then - it was only rare earth magnets that made them small enough to consider using in cars at high speed/ranges. Its always been possible to make a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances but even today there are none like this, because people want to take their cars on the road on the weekend without having to worry. In the 1900's it was the call of the open road and cheap travel (petrol was very cheap then) that made petrol win.
- fragmede 7y ago
  > Its always been possible to make a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances Early models of the Nissan leaf weren't too much more than that (though there have been some advances since the invention of electricity). However, golf carts are the modern version of the small electric car - and is street legal in service jurisdictions! (Okay, technically what's street legal isn't literally a golf cart, and is called a low speed vehicle (LSV) and will only do 25mph, and aren't always electric, but close enough!)
  - amelius 7y ago
    For short distances you could use a bicycle or scooter instead. Cars are mostly useful for larger distances, i.e. on highways, where slow vehicles are not allowed.
    - chadcmulligan 7y ago
      bicycles / scooters have a limited application though - families with young kids, long trips, older people, people with injuries, its raining, are just some of the groups / times these are excluded. Cars still are superior general purpose solution for travel.
Beldur 7y ago
When I visited the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, I was surprised to find out, that Porsche's first car was an Electric one :-) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_P1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_P1
- amai 7y ago
  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner-Porsche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner-Porsche from 1900: "The Lohner-Porsche's design was studied by Boeing and NASA to create the Apollo program's Lunar Roving Vehicle."
ryanmercer 7y ago
So I started reading popular mechanics 1905-2005 last weekend, in the first issue of 1905 they actually show a little blurb about electric mail trucks, I knew EVs went way back but found it pretty neat.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ineedasername 7y ago
We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning All true. If we ignore the massive increase in infrastructure needed to make them viable outside of cities. And also ignore, as the article does, the time it would take to charge along with the short lifetime of batteries in that era. It doesn't matter if their range equaled that of an IC, the IC could be ready for the next leg of a trip almost instantly compared to an EV. Effectively this halved the range of an EV. If you could only drive 60 miles and there was no guaranteed prospect of charging at the end, you had to be able to return home to charge, meaning 30 miles out and 30 miles back. All issues that still represent bottlenecks to EV adoption today, albeit much less so, and which are gradually being overcome.
- magduf 7y ago
  The range isn't really a problem: all you have to do is have "battery stations" where you swap out the batteries in a few minutes. This has its issues (related to ownership of the batteries, and also standardization), but technically it's completely doable. They've had lead-acid batteries for over a century now, so if society had wanted to make EVs the norm, this could have been done.
  - ineedasername 7y ago
    It's still an issue, requiring large infrastructure investments to build battery stations and the charging equipment. Compare this to gasoline and it's precursor mixtures which could be derived from coal, for which there already existed massive distribution infrastructure. I think the author reads entirely too much into the supposed psychology of an IC powered vehicle instead of the much more simple explanation: path dependency.

215 points by mibzman 7y ago

If we replaced all cars with EV's how much greenhouse gas would we actually curb? I know we're shifting the strain of the car producing greenhouse gases tp the power plant. Anybody know the numbers? Intuitively I always thought the only way of actually making a dent in emissions is to change the way we live by shifting to public transportation. Suburbia is what makes the US the leading greenhouse gas producers and only changing the way we live to be more like cities such as NYC or Tokyo do we actually stand to make a change. We need to reduce the usage of cars to make a meaningful dent in greenhouse gas emissions.

todd8 7y ago

Perhaps we could have had electric vehicles sooner, but we would have needed clean sources of electricity, not coal powered generation, to make a difference.

Robotbeat 7y ago
Many of the largest early sources of electricity were, in fact, hydro power. We could've just kept building more of those until the mid 20th century when we would've pretty much maxed out the rivers (in the US). And don't forget wind power. Could do that, too. The intermittentness handled in areas by hydro as well. Then nuclear in the mid 20th century.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
  If we talk about world, not just USA, then many places just don't have the luxury of hydro, or even wind. And often gas needs to be imported making it expensive. Coal was just cheap and effective to begin with.
rcMgD2BwE72F 7y ago
No, it would not have been needed because even with coal-generated electricity, EV are cleaner than ICE (because small engine are far less efficient than big power plants). Besides, if all the car were powered by electricity, we probably would have made the electric grid cleaner and switch to renewables far sooner. Because switching from coal to gas and gas to solar/wind would have had a positive impact on almost all types of energy consumption: train, cars, heating, lightning, etc. Instead we had to invest in both the electric grid and ICE to try to make them clean, instead of just the grid.
- todd8 7y ago
  I don't believe that this is completely accurate. According to the information found on page 7 of Cleaner Cars from Cradle to Grave, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists [1], an electric vehicle that is charged by electricity from oil or coal generation has overall equivalent emissions to a gasoline vehicle that obtains 29 miles/gallon. Roughly on par with fuel-efficient contemporary gasoline powered vehicles. So I stand by my claim that electric cars don't solve the problem without addressing the emissions due to coal/oil based grid power. In an alternative history, perhaps we could avoid petrochemical power, but it's not clear to me how we would have done that. Ford began production of the Model T in 1908. Solar and wind production would not have been feasible in the early 20th century, and even today hydroelectric power provides only a fraction of our energy consumption. See [2]. With regard to the original article, I find its analysis flawed. As I've already stated, power production for electric vehicles wouldn't have been clean in the early 1900's, but modern clean electric cars depend on more than a power grid based on renewable energy sources. They depend on lithium-ion batteries, invented in 1980. What would the country's electric cars have utilized before the 1980s? (Lead-acid and NiCad have serious environmental impacts, Lead-acid has poor energy vs weight, and NiMH batteries were not invented until 1989. All three of these battery types have charging rate limits that prevent them from being used in practical cars.[3]) Perhaps we could have done much better in the past with our decisions, but "masculine daring-do"[4] isn't the reason that we ended up with the levels of CO2 that we have in the atmosphere today. [1] https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cleaner-Cars-from-Cradle-to-Grave-full-report.pdf https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2015/11/Cl... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/media/File:History_of_energy_consumption_in_the_United_States.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/m... [3] https://phys.org/news/2015-04-history-batteries.html https://phys.org/news/2015-04-history-batteries.html [4] From the original articles sub-title.

thrower123 7y ago

I don't think you can discount the military applications as a factor. It is not as extreme as in aviation in terms of raw innovation, but without the demand for millions of engines for trucks, tanks, jeeps, and all the other machinery of war sparked by the warfare of the first part of the 20th century, the internal combustion engine would not be as ubiquitous as it is today. In thirty years armies went from marching on oats and horseshoes to petrol and Goodyears. Maneuver warfare would have been impossible on electric. And then when the war was over, all that surplus machinery was around, and so were the factories that built it.

m-i-l 7y ago
This aligns to the timings of the switch to ICE, which appears to be between 1914 and 1917 - see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20181692 .

lgleason 7y ago

Battery technology has been, and to a certain degree still is the limiting factor for electric cars...and the fact is that gasoline is still a denser form of energy storage than batteries by volume, weight etc.. I'm saying this as a someone who prefers electrics over ICE...

Tade0 7y ago
I think that if, then only in terms of cost. Every quarter or so I do a 1500km(935 mile) trip and back. Nowadays it takes me two days, because I realized that spending around 20h behind the wheel without rest is simply dangerous. My car's highway range is about 440 miles - but I rarely drive that far without refueling because the longest distance between my usual stops is 350 miles. And once stopped I don't just fill up an move along - I stretch my legs, grab something to eat etc. My point being: given that the newest Model S achieves 370 miles and my favourite spots all happen to have superchargers I could probably pull this off in a Tesla adding maybe one stop and one hour to my trip. We're there in terms of range. Now all that is needed is a reduction in cost.
- emilecantin 7y ago
  I've done a roadtrip from Montreal to Atlanta in a Model S, back in 2015. I've found that by the time the battery runs low, you're due for a break anyway, so it doesn't really change the way you travel that much.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  1600 round mile trip, give or take. Georgia to Western Ohio then across to Eastern Pennsylvania, relatives in Eastern to North Eastern Ohio but that is an EV desert. I did this within weeks of buying a Model 3 LR. Added about ninety minutes to the 600 mile drive. Three stops. I did ignore the Navigation charge time so I could avoid the SC inside of Cincinnati. If you follow the suggestions of the car and are willing to stop more the charge times are lower. However as I was hoping 190 to 210 at a time and driving the standard speed of I75 at the time I tended to push the charge to 80% or more. Now the reason there is ninety minutes is you need to factor in charging at your destination. Seeing that my relatives had nothing more than standard 120 I was in effect anchored to my closest SC which was thirty six miles away. So at that point I charged to 95% which took longer. They don't live in a small Ohio town but there were only two good chargers, one at Nissan and one at the Ford dealer. Neither is good for a true long range car. After that trip I realized there really is no point in carrying the mobile charge cable. I simply found hotels with nearby SC setups. Do not rely on destination charging as you are just as likely to find "guests" who act as if they own it and hotels are not keen on stepping in. There are times I swear fellow EV drivers are the most entitled pricks I have ever met.

Causality1 7y ago

They could've worked in cities. Lead-acid batteries, though, have never had the energy/weight ratio necessary for the type of long-range driving necessary outside of highly urbanized areas.

jacquesm 7y ago
Likely if the fossil fuel bonanza had not happened there would have been more interest in improving battery chemistry.
- Something1234 7y ago
  I would say that fossil fuels are very important for a lot of our battery technology. I believe that a large number of important chemicals and materials like plastics are derived from oil.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    They are important, but not as important as they are to transportation. The quantities of oil required for fuel production dwarf the quantities required for plastics and other important chemicals. It's still a sizeable amount but not even close to what gets burned every day. It's just that fossil oil is - relatively speaking - very cheap compared to other sources.
- bmurphy1976 7y ago
  Or more public transportation.
soperj 7y ago
And we would have all been better off. Cities would have been much more livable, and walkable, and people could commute by train/plane.
- Causality1 7y ago
  More livable for the urbanites. Everybody else, like my relatives who still live on dirt roads, can go screw themselves apparently.

rb808 7y ago

You can visit Thomas Edison's house with his lab near Newark NJ. There are two electric cars on display. Interestingly here it says in 1914 38% of all the cars on the road were electric; 22% gasoline, 40% steam powered. http://www.edisonmuckers.org/edisons-cars/ http://www.edisonmuckers.org/edisons-cars/

whenchamenia 7y ago
Of all the pre-war cars I have been in or around... only steam had the power to throw you back in the seat. It would be interesting to see a modern multifuel interpretation of one. Might be well suited to long runtimes and alternate fuels.
- mysterydip 7y ago
  Not exactly what you asked for, but have you seen BMW's turbosteamer concept? https://newatlas.com/go/4936/ https://newatlas.com/go/4936/
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - mikepurvis 7y ago
    Ha, I remember reading about that in university. One of the options my group considered for a culminating project in our engineering degree was a 6-stroke rotary (Wankel) engine that would have a water injection phase after the exhaust was pressed out. I don't think manufacturing a working model of such a thing would have been within reach for a couple of undergrads, although the project we went with was almost as ambitious— we ended up building a mostly functional laundry washer from scratch.
  - wukerplank 7y ago
    Woah! Never heard of it. > The long-term development goal is to have a system capable of volume production within ten years. I guess they canned the project?
- 7y ago

Swizec 7y ago

We also could have had steam powered cars. Jay Leno once said that he got pulled over on the freeway for breaking the speed limit in his Stanley Steamer from 1906-ish. Darn thing has a top speed of 127mph. My 2018 motorcycle tops out at 110mph, to give you a comparison. Why don't we have steam cars? Because in the early 1900's steam cars they couldn't compete with the elegance of ICE vehicles. The engines were big and heavy, the fuel was hard to manage, they took a long time to warm up, etc etc. The internal combustion engine was just a way better tool for the job. Same reason electric cars didn't win: The ICE was just a way better tool for the job at the time. This is now changing, but very slowly. Tesla, for example, still doesn't have an official Nurburgring lap time because it simply isn't able to drive at racing speeds for long enough without the battery overheating and reducing power output to avoid damage. Yes racing electric cars exist and they're awesome, but even Formula E swaps cars in the middle of the race because a single car can't last long enough.[1] It does look like VW's electric supercar currently attacking the Nurburgring lap record. Already holds the absolute record for Pikes Peak. Exciting times we live in :)[2] [1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-time-clocked-in-by-Tesla-Model-S-in-N%C3%BCrburgring https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-time-clocked-in-by-Tesla-M... [2]https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/vws-record-breaking-electric-car-takes-on-worlds-scariest-racetrack-nurburgring/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/vws-record-breaking-ele...

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
There were a few attempts at steam motorcycles/bicycles too - which boggles the mind a bit. Definitely not going to meet modern health and safety. Here's one from 1860: https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/motorcycles/a26052/1860s-vintage-motorcycle/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/motorcycles/a26052/186... Ransomes, famous maker of traction engines and inventor of the powered lawnmower had a couple of patents for steam motorcycles, but I've never seen details of what they envisaged.
wmf 7y ago
Isn't the whole point of the article that ICE was not way better and racing is a harmful distraction?
- 7y ago

egypturnash 7y ago

Hindsight is 20/20.

oblib 7y ago

Early models of Ford's Model T had adjustable carburetors to run on ethanol with gasoline as an option. Not electric, but renewable, sustainable, and I'd assume (maybe wrongly) mostly carbon neutral.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago
Everything is "carbon neutral" on a long enough time period. You can make ethanol carbon neutral on a one year time period if you want.
SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
The problem with ethanol is that the most efficient plants for making it also happen to be food crops.
- imtringued 7y ago
  No, that's not the problem. The problem is that driving tractors and producing fertilizer requires a lot of fossil fuels.
  - rightbyte 7y ago
    You can run the tractors on ethanol also, though?
- nickik 7y ago
  That's only an issue if you assume that farm land is a limited resource but that not really the problem in practice. There are no fuel shortages just because you have cars that use ethanol. I'm not a huge fan of ethanol specially not how it was handled in the political process (farm subsides) but using it in general is not a bad idea if it can compete.
nickik 7y ago
I think methanol makes far more sense then ethanol. But basically you can cheaply build cars that can run on pretty much anything. It would be easy to require all cars to support everything from M10,E10 to M80,E80 without much issue. I think 20-30 years ago cars should have started requiring cars to support all that stuff and allow competition between the different fuels and different methods of fuel production. Meaning most likely methanol from gas, ethnaol from food or gas from saudi arabia. Methanol from natural gas could have been incredibly successful specially because natural gas export is not an easy problem. Meaning that gas prices in the US were incredibly cheap and a huge fleet of car hungry for methanol would have made it reasonable to do the conversion process. Far less methane could have been wasted into the air. Now I feel like time has passed and EV make more sense.

Animats 7y ago

* But no sudden technological breakthrough explains the automobile’s arrival in the 1890s either.* Er, steel? Steel was about as exotic as titanium is now until the 1860s when the Bessemer process went into volume production.

maxxxxx 7y ago
I think steam engines prototyped a lot of the needed technology like lubrication, manufacturing of precision shafts and heat resistance which then could be applied to the gas engine.
- dsfyu404ed 7y ago
  We didn't have "good" machine tooling for mass production of metal parts until the 1880/1890s. The technology existed but it was all exotic and high priced because we just weren't good at making metal stuff.
  - iguy 7y ago
    Depedns on your definitions of "good" and "mass". UK railways crossed 500 million people a year sometime before 1880, and as many journeys as the population sometime in the 1840s. That's sounds like a lot of metal wheels & rails to me, certainly not space-ship exotic. Although of course things continued to grow from there.
    - oblio 7y ago
      > UK railways The keyword being "UK". We can include the US and a bit of Western Europe plus Japan. For much of the world a train was exotic even far into the 20th century.
      - TomMarius 7y ago
        Except for China you named most of the world population back then ;-) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_in_1900 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...

8bitsrule 7y ago

Related article (by Alexis Madrigal), "The Electric Taxi Company You Could Have Called in 1900" about an attempt to roll out an electric cab company in NYC and the rest of New England. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/the-electric-taxi-company-you-could-have-called-in-1900/72481/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/03/the-e... Another article which touches on the subject: https://grist.org/article/2011-03-28-alexis-madrigal-crazy-greentech-history-powering-the-dream/ https://grist.org/article/2011-03-28-alexis-madrigal-crazy-g... "At a time when many people were stuck inside new urban confines, unable to get outside to private spaces, having a car that could tour, a car with a lot of range, was quite appealing.... And it was just sexy to go fast. People like to go fast."

Johnny555 7y ago

Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles, but didn’t give riders the same illusion of freedom and masculine derring-do Isn't that the same reason we still don't all drive electric cars? I was always disappointed that NEV's didn't take off, seems like a perfect solution for cities and even suburbs -- lanes could be striped much narrower and parking could be much more dense. But few people want to drive a glorified golf cart to the office, even if they only drive 10 miles and are stuck in stop and go traffic anyway, so the 25mph NEV cap wouldn't really change their commute time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhood_Electric_Vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neighborhood_Electric_Vehicle

axaxs 7y ago

Unpopular opinion, but I truly feel battery powered cars are a dead end. Gas won out over earlier models because of its unique properties, most of which is its easy availability and high energy density. Batteries are heavy, and range limited. A true successor to the ICE must offer the same freedoms afforded. Whether it's super fast charging, nuclear, or a greener fuel, though, I'm not sure.

LeoPanthera 7y ago
The 2019 Tesla model S has a range of 370 miles, and I assume that as time passes, more EVs will have a range approaching that figure. That range is considerably longer than the range of my bladder, so once charging increases in speed, this "problem" simply vanishes. We're already on our way there, the first 250kW charger opened this week, and will add 180 miles of range in 15 minutes. In fact, it's better than an ICE car, because I can charge at home, and start every single journey with 100% charge.
- forkandwait 7y ago
  How long does it take to charge? Granted 350 miles is a long trip, but some 9f us drive from Seattle to San Francisco and we can't do that in 350 burst waiting overnight for the car to charge. Personally I think a hybrid that plugs into 120, with a commuting range 50 miles and a back up gas engine will be the sweet spot
  - emilecantin 7y ago
    Lithium-ion batteries can be fully charged safely in about an hour, give or take, regardless of their capacity. 80% charge is about half that, IIRC. The reason it takes a while to recharge EVs is because of the enormous size of their batteries. Tesla Superchargers inject more power into the car than what comes into a regular home. Quick math: A 100KWh is going to take a bit more than 100KW of power to charge in an hour. For comparison, an oven uses about 3KW...
  - esotericn 7y ago
    You can get back 120 miles of range in 20 minutes. The M3 I believe is even faster. Range is no longer an issue for modern electric vehicles.

jhoechtl 7y ago

Why would we have had electric car from the beginning? Producing an E-car consumes more energy than a car with an internal combustion engine, the milage is a joke. And if electricity is coming from coal power plants it is all but green.

LeoPanthera 7y ago
> Producing an E-car consumes more energy than a car with an internal combustion engine, That's true! These differences change as soon as the cars are driven. EVs are powered by electricity, which is generally a cleaner energy source than gasoline. Battery electric cars make up for their higher manufacturing emissions within eighteen months of driving — shorter range models can offset the extra emissions within 6 months. Source: https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8 https://youtu.be/K9m9WDxmSN8 > the milage is a joke. The 2019 Tesla model S has a range of 370 miles, and on new superchargers will add 180 miles of range in 15 minutes. Source: https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/24/new-tesla-model-s-370-miles-of-range-epa-goes-from-bay-area-to-la-on-one-charge-tesla-killer-comparisons/ https://cleantechnica.com/2019/04/24/new-tesla-model-s-370-m... Of course, most EV owners rarely use any charger other than their home one, since you can start every journey with 100% charge. This might be "a joke" to you, I cannot say. > And if electricity is coming from coal power plants it is all but green. That's also true! Lucky then that all electricity does not come from coal power plants. In the US, that's only 17.8%. Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/ https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/ Those with solar panels on their homes don't get their power from any kind of power plant at all, just the sun.

adrianmonk 7y ago

> Early electric cars performed better in cities than internal combustion vehicles This article talks a lot about cars around 1900. In the US in 1900, 60% of the population lived in rural areas and only 40% lived in cities. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States#Historical_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_Sta...) So working well in rural areas was probably a more important concern. A product that works OK for all your potential customers is better (from a business's point of view) than one that works a bit better for some customers and not at all for others.

sitkack 7y ago
85% of all the income was probably made in cities.
- adrianmonk 7y ago
  Valid point. I couldn't easily find data on that, though I do think that at a certain point cars became one of those things you find a way to afford (even if you don't have a lot of money) because of how useful they are if you live in a rural area.

chrisco255 7y ago

It's amusing to see people "Monday morning quarterbacking" on one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. "We could have done it ANOTHER way!" ignores the fact that it might not have happened at all.

chadcmulligan 7y ago

Some of the reasons why petrol won: There was no electric grid to speak of - even now there is concern the grid can't support all EV's, once you were outside the cities (and there weren't many back then) the grid was spotty. The miracle of being able to pour some cheap liquid in an engine and drive for miles is a considerable achievement. Lead acid batteries weren't very good and were expensive (and still are) and don't last long compared to petrol engines. Electric motors were big then - it was only rare earth magnets that made them small enough to consider using in cars at high speed/ranges. Its always been possible to make a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances but even today there are none like this, because people want to take their cars on the road on the weekend without having to worry. In the 1900's it was the call of the open road and cheap travel (petrol was very cheap then) that made petrol win.

fragmede 7y ago
> Its always been possible to make a small electric commuter car to drive round at 30mph for short distances Early models of the Nissan leaf weren't too much more than that (though there have been some advances since the invention of electricity). However, golf carts are the modern version of the small electric car - and is street legal in service jurisdictions! (Okay, technically what's street legal isn't literally a golf cart, and is called a low speed vehicle (LSV) and will only do 25mph, and aren't always electric, but close enough!)
- amelius 7y ago
  For short distances you could use a bicycle or scooter instead. Cars are mostly useful for larger distances, i.e. on highways, where slow vehicles are not allowed.
  - chadcmulligan 7y ago
    bicycles / scooters have a limited application though - families with young kids, long trips, older people, people with injuries, its raining, are just some of the groups / times these are excluded. Cars still are superior general purpose solution for travel.

Beldur 7y ago

When I visited the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, I was surprised to find out, that Porsche's first car was an Electric one :-) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_P1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porsche_P1

amai 7y ago
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner-Porsche https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lohner-Porsche from 1900: "The Lohner-Porsche's design was studied by Boeing and NASA to create the Apollo program's Lunar Roving Vehicle."

ryanmercer 7y ago

So I started reading popular mechanics 1905-2005 last weekend, in the first issue of 1905 they actually show a little blurb about electric mail trucks, I knew EVs went way back but found it pretty neat.

deleted 7y ago

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ineedasername 7y ago

We Could Have Had Electric Cars from the Beginning All true. If we ignore the massive increase in infrastructure needed to make them viable outside of cities. And also ignore, as the article does, the time it would take to charge along with the short lifetime of batteries in that era. It doesn't matter if their range equaled that of an IC, the IC could be ready for the next leg of a trip almost instantly compared to an EV. Effectively this halved the range of an EV. If you could only drive 60 miles and there was no guaranteed prospect of charging at the end, you had to be able to return home to charge, meaning 30 miles out and 30 miles back. All issues that still represent bottlenecks to EV adoption today, albeit much less so, and which are gradually being overcome.

magduf 7y ago
The range isn't really a problem: all you have to do is have "battery stations" where you swap out the batteries in a few minutes. This has its issues (related to ownership of the batteries, and also standardization), but technically it's completely doable. They've had lead-acid batteries for over a century now, so if society had wanted to make EVs the norm, this could have been done.
- ineedasername 7y ago
  It's still an issue, requiring large infrastructure investments to build battery stations and the charging equipment. Compare this to gasoline and it's precursor mixtures which could be derived from coal, for which there already existed massive distribution infrastructure. I think the author reads entirely too much into the supposed psychology of an IC powered vehicle instead of the much more simple explanation: path dependency.