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It’s hard not to look at this and think that battery technology would have progressed far more had the electric car been chosen rather than gas and how that wou

It’s hard not to look at this and think that battery technology would have progressed far more had the electric car been chosen rather than gas and how that would have meant all the investment into efficiency that the gasoline engine got, batteries and electric motors would have gotten all of that investment instead. I was trying to find the range of gas cars vs electric in 1912, and it looks like gas cars at that period tended to be a little over 100 miles and the best electrics were 80, with most at 50. It’s too bad the Model T wasn’t electric. “ While the prototypes seemed to work well enough, in Ford’s view they had a fatal flaw. His development crew had been unable to get the Edison batteries to perform as required. While nickel-iron batteries have a long service life, they are slow to charge, produce less voltage per cell, and as we’ve already seen, are considerably more expensive. To move the project along, the team substituted ordinary lead-acid batteries, and at that point Ford’s patience reached its limit. Without the Edison batteries, the electric flivver no longer had any reason to exist, in Ford’s mind anyway. After a reported expenditure of $1.5 million, mainly in Edison batteries, Henry pulled the plug.” https://www.macsmotorcitygarage.com/henry-fords-electric-model-t/ https://www.macsmotorcitygarage.com/henry-fords-electric-mod...

raxxorraxor 3y ago
It should be noted that the environmental impact wasn't really known and the energy potential of fuels still is unmatched. From an engineering perspective with the information available at that time, the decision was probably "correct". Batteries were something like a necessary evil. For example to propel uboats because of the lack of oxygen. Otherwise the energy density and triviality of re-fuel-ing easily wins out.
KolmogorovComp 3y ago
This raise an interesting question. Is improving the battery tech an inherently more difficult problem than the efficiency of a thermic motor? I'd intuitively think so, as it's mostly chemical compared to mechanical work, and that would explain why thermic engine were favoured at the time. (On top of economic reasons)
- usrusr 3y ago
  If battery tech was easy and it only failed to progress faster due to lack of a well-funded use case, then submarine warfare should have brought us to Tesla-grade batteries in no time.
  - nick222226 3y ago
    Fission batteries, baby!
    - Gare 3y ago
      Currently there are two land vehicles that drive with them :)
  - fragmede 3y ago
    That did bring them nuclear reactors though. Hasn't helped my electricity come from nuclear.
    - Philip-J-Fry 3y ago
      That's the next step though. SMRs, Small Modular Reactors. Basically the same sort of thing that's in a submarine but dotted around our neighbourhoods and cities.
      - nradov 3y ago
        We are never, ever going to see SMRs dotted around our neighborhoods. I like the concept of nuclear power in general, but the security and terrorism concerns alone will kill any possibility of putting them in residential areas regardless of any potential economic benefits.
  - __m 3y ago
    Panasonic-grade
- avianlyric 3y ago
MBCook 3y ago
I had heard that Edison‘s batteries were subpar compared to other contemporaries. Which makes me wonder if things would’ve been different if Ford and Edison weren’t friends. But gasoline is so energy dense and at the time was so incredibly cheap I think it would’ve been a fight even if the batteries were better.
asdfsadfklj 3y ago
I don't think it would have been popular. Oil is very cheap $/potential energy and not range-limited in the same way EVs are. And even if you dumped trillions of $s in battery tech 100 years ago it's not clear it would be enough to really improve the situation.
emodendroket 3y ago
Given how central gasoline was to developments leading up to and during the Pacific War (like the role of the Dutch East Indies), history would change in all sorts of difficult-to-imagine ways.
hef19898 3y ago
The reason ICE cars won, is that electro motors got good enough to serve as starter motors for ICEs. Which is kind of ironic.
- olyjohn 3y ago
  Also if you wanted to travel a longer distance, you just threw a couple cans of fuel in the back. Neither electricity nor fuel stations were abundant, but extending the range using gas was dead nuts simple.
  - berkes 3y ago
    It makes the assumption that in early 1900 people wanted or needed to travel far. Did they? Even today, most travels are under 100km, often averaging around <60km a day for commutes and less for non commutes. Would that have been different then? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that back then, when the car was replacing horse drawn carriers, on a very rudimentary infrastructure (no tarmac, no paved roads outside of City centers) it was even less.
    - toast0 3y ago
      It's not only about traveling long distances. It's about traveling short distances many times without refueling. And about recovering from using your fuel. It's easier to walk (or hitchhike) to a fueling station and carry a gallon or 5 of fuel back to your vehicle than it is to carry back a similar amount of electric charge. So you've got to move the vehicle somewhere it can charge --- not too hard today, electricity is near omnipresent and highly standardized in the developed world and mobile generators are common; but in the early 1900s, not so much. I imagine few people were regularly using personal vehicles for commuting at the dawn of cars, but cars and trucks are immensely useful to move goods. Rapid point to point transport of goods for routes beyond navagable waters and the rail network opens up a lot of opportunity for trade and doing business in more of the country. Note that cars can work with minimal infrastructure --- pavement is nice, but not required, although modern cars might not like it very much.
intrasight 3y ago
> ... battery technology would have progressed far more had the electric car been chosen rather than gas and how that would have meant all the investment into ... Replace gas/elecric with digital/analog. Is something I contemplated having studied neuroscience.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  I think I somewhat disagree, having studied EE, although I did get out on purpose, so maybe I am biased. Analog circuits can be a real pain, though. When the voltage means something, you actually have to get it right. With digital circuits, just smash it in the right direction as fast as possible. Get anywhere near Vdd and you have a 1, perfect!
sethev 3y ago
$1.5 million in 1912 is almost $50 million today, so he invested pretty heavily in electric before moving on. Without the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to imagine that going differently. I wonder if anyone at the time had an inkling of the long-term downsides of gasoline powered engines?
- wredue 3y ago
  Climate change predictions look to have “began” around 10 years after the first patent for gas vehicles, but predate mass production by a decade. There probably wasn’t widespread knowledge at the time of mass production. Then ~70 years ago, vehicle and oil giants absolutely knew what was happening and got the wheels spinning on a massive propaganda machine that continues to thrive today.
  - collias 3y ago
    To be fair, I'm not sure choosing electric over gasoline cars at that time would have much effect on our current climate situation, assuming equal timelines for renewable tech. All those cars would have needed electricity from somewhere, and at the time, gasoline and coal were pretty cheap ways to generate it.
  - Wytwwww 3y ago
    It's not like they had solar, wind or nuclear back then. Power was produced by burning coal which isn't that much better than burning gasoline.
toast0 3y ago
> I was trying to find the range of gas cars vs electric in 1912, and it looks like gas cars at that period tended to be a little over 100 miles and the best electrics were 80, with most at 50. It’s too bad the Model T wasn’t electric. It's pretty trivial to range extend a gas vehicle within reasonable limits. Gas cans had a lot of development (the shape and features of a modern metal gas can came together in the 1930s), but any container sturdy enough and sealable will work. In a model T, fuel was fed by gravity, so tank capacity is strongly limited by where you can put the tank. On a vehicle with a fuel pump, there would be more flexibility (my first car had a 33 gallon tank... if you combined that with a fuel efficient powertrain, the range would be huge)
- jetbalsa 3y ago
  and at the time of the Model T you could just about run them on anything with hydrocarbons in them with some adjustments. A electric car required infrastructure that just didn't exist at the time until after the Rural Electrification Act in 1936
  - hunter2_ 3y ago
    > infrastructure that just didn't exist at the time until after the Rural Electrification Act in 1936 While not entirely critical I suppose, not getting stranded in an EV today also relies on much newer stuff as well, like the on board computer using cellular communications and GPS to help find a charging station within range of your destination. I imagine that in the absence of this assistance, the number of disabled EVs would be intolerably high, and delivering a can of gas is much simpler than delivering electricity or towing.
    - jetbalsa 3y ago
      also if the amount of EV charging stations was the same as the amount of gas stations we wouldn't have that issue as well. Early gas was bought at stores in cans most of the time, bulk pumping was just not very common.
- berkes 3y ago
Teever 3y ago
I've had similar thoughts with regards to the development of solar panels. Imagine if America chose to respond to the 1973 oil embargo by investing tons of resources into the development of solar panels and made true energy independence a priority. We would be in a totally different position right now with regards to the climate and geopolitics.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  We would've spent a lot of time hanging around local maxima in both cases. The development of both modern batteries and solar cells required advanced material science. No one was going to build a Model Y in 1950, or a 25%-efficient solar cell in 1970. EVs lost because gasoline is fucking awesome when considered solely as a means to transport energy and release it in a controlled manner. That's really all there is to it.
  - Teever 3y ago
    Yeah, this is a thought I just had a few days ago and I've been meaning to look into what the bottle neck with regards to solar panels was. What sort of innovations in material science were needed to bring about the development of more efficient or affordable solar panels?
    - CamperBob2 3y ago
      For solar cells, it was (according to Wikipedia) 1954 before the first practical PV cell was built. So that's already a late start. From there it seems that a lot of technologies had to develop in parallel, from larger silicon wafers to advances in understanding how to work with thin-film materials. Meanwhile, in the 1950s and 1960s nuclear power was going to be the Next Big Thing, and it was understandable that low-efficiency PV tech was of interest only for things like satellites. IMHO, the top-down energy policy managers that couldn't fulfill the "too cheap to meter" promises of nuclear power wouldn't have been up to the task of accelerating PV technology either. Solar cells are not like gas lasers, which could have been built in a neon-sign shop in the 1930s if the science needed to steer the technology had been in place. They are more like practical neural nets. Sure, they could have been built in the 1960s... if only GPUs weren't so darned hard to come by. (And as someone else suggested, any nation that began the 20th century by pouring the resources into PV cells and EVs that we put into fossil fuels wouldn't have lived to see the 21st.) Similar story for lithium batteries. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7215417/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7215417/ seems to be a decent survey of their evolutionary timeline. They consist of multiple discrete technologies. R&D that goes into a good cathode has to be done separately from work on anodes. Same for electrolytes and separators. Looking at the bibliography in that article, batteries don't seem like the sort of field where progress could have been accelerated just by throwing money at it, and I think that's true for PV tech as well.
bee_rider 3y ago
It might have resulted in a better world, less oil consumption and all that. But who knows? I wouldn’t be surprised if the solution they came up with was to just use some slow charging tech and swap them at the battery-station. Hand over your spent battery to the local attendant, he’ll either bring it in and pay some recycling fee or chuck it in a nearby creek for free.
- Wytwwww 3y ago
  > It might have resulted in a better world, less oil consumption and all that. Considering pretty much all power back then was produced by burning coal and that lead acid batteries are not exactly environmentally friendly it's not that obvious.
- bear141 3y ago
  This is the tech that most Asian motorcycle manufacturers have recently agreed upon for interchangeable batteries without charging wait times.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    That’s interesting. Is there some plan in the agreement to prevent people from ending up with beat up old batteries?
aetherson 3y ago
This is really divorced from reality. There was just no way at all that electric cars would've been viable in the 20th Century. No, we wouldn't magically have developed modern computer-controlled battery packs of lithium ion batteries in 1920 if we just wanted it hard enough.
- resoluteteeth 3y ago
  I'm sure the performance wouldn't have been comparable to modern electric cars, but what if car companies in 1920 had focused on producing electric cars that had a shorter range with a lower top speed? It's not like people were commuting 60 miles each way on highways in 1920, and I doubt model t's were actually normally hitting their theoretical top speed anyway.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - notahacker 3y ago
    > I'm sure the performance wouldn't have been comparable to modern electric cars, but what if car companies in 1920 had focused on producing electric cars that had a shorter range with a lower top speed? They'd have been outcompeted by the cars with longer range and higher speed (and no reliance on lead acid batteries that must have horribly degraded with intensive use), just like they were in the 1910s. It's not like they weren't tried: the tech had a longer history than the ICE and they actually outsold the ICE in the US in the first decade of the twentieth century
- JesseObrien 3y ago
  >No, we wouldn't magically have developed modern computer-controlled battery packs of lithium ion batteries in 1920 if we just wanted it hard enough. That's not what the commenter said. Don't put your interpretation of the words into theirs. It is very feasible that the investment of 100-some-odd years of battery research and a marked non-future invested as deeply into oil and gas as we have now would have rendered our entire world vastly different. This is not a claim that the future would have happened sooner, but rather the events that unfolded and the research would have been different.
mrtksn 3y ago
I recall reading somewhere that the ICE took off because there were quite a lot of low hanging fruits and a path with less resistance, thus it let faster progress towards the desirable properties of a car. For example, it's way easier to move around a can of fuel rather than being limited to an electric grid in a time when electricity and proper roads were not ubiquitous yet. I imagine it would have been too limiting to need to bring the car somewhere specific to re-charge when you are still trying to figure out what this automobile thing is good for. Is it good at the farm for example? Can't tell with the electric car if you don't have electricity at the farm.
- theodric 3y ago
  Furthermore, it's a lot easier to carry an equivalent amount of energy in petrochemical form vs the primitive lead-acid batteries of the day, long before hyper-optimized computer controlled motors were available to wring every last milliwatthour of efficiency out of them. And now increase distances and therefore desirable speeds corresponding with the growth of population, and it becomes more and more impractical to use electricity for personal transport in the years after 1912. I think viable electric cars landed about when they became practicable. Lead-acid absolutely shits the bed rapidly if discharged below FIFTY percent SoC, so take your kWh rating and cut it in half straight away. And remember that you're carrying around a ton of wet lead to achieve that. Not great. NiCd is crap, NiMH is better but not overwhelmingly so, and lead-acid can deliver a lot more current. Li-ion, then? Remember how rubbish laptop battery max charge cycle lifetimes were in 1999? The battery lasts maybe a year of regular use, and then it's shot and the laptop runs for 30 seconds and powers off. And it costs $300 to replace. Now make it 200x the size and put it in a car you use for your daily commute and get ready to spend BMW money annually on new Li-ion. The improvements in battery tech in just the last 15 years are really something to behold, and not coincidentally that's when Tesla was able to start shipping compelling vehicles. Now somebody tell me why I'm wrong ;-)
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    > Now somebody tell me why I'm wrong ;-) If you insist: electric motors have always been far more efficient than their ICE counterparts. 80% is easy, 90% is doable. 95% and up requires more tricks and even regular EVs don't bother because they might as well use some of that waste heat to heat the pack or the interior of the vehicle.
PKop 3y ago
Any nation pursuing this would have been dominated geopolitically, militarily, and economically by those that just took advantage of cheaper and more productive use of combustion engines.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  Yep.. It's game theory, always has been.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
ajross 3y ago
> battery technology would have progressed far more Seems unlikely. The core innovation behind lithium cells is polymer chemistry that didn't exist until the 80's. There might have been a market to drive adoption, but it still needs to wait for the science.
cornholio 3y ago
> battery technology would have progressed far more had the electric car been chosen This seems unlikely. There were major industrial and military uses for rechargeable batteries throughout the 20th century. Things like submarines, portable electronics, stationary fallback for critical services (phone exchanges) etc., all added up to a substantial economic interest in battery technology. The Nikel-Cadmium chemistry was known since 1899, but the materials and production process were considered too expensive to make them practical until mid 20th century. Advanced processing such as powder sintering to increase area were simply unknown at the time when the ICE vs EV competition was in play. By the 1920s, the ICE and petrol fueled cars were capable of ranges and fuel economies we can barely reach even today with Lithium batteries, a technology that became possible only in the 70s, taking advantage of substantial lateral progress in material and chemical science. A hypothetical world of electric vehicles would have spurred battery sales and investment by an order of magnitude or so, but the actual effects in hastening productization of high density cells would have probably been marginal and below what was required to win against the ICE, disproving the hypothesis. You can see this diminishing return of research at work today where, despite the order of magnitude increase in the battery market, progress is very still sluggish, pitted against hard, physical limits.
- cyberax 3y ago
  > This seems unlikely. There were major industrial and military uses for rechargeable batteries throughout the 20th century. But there are non-rechargable batteries. Zinc-air batteries have around 600 Wh/kg energy density (3 times more than Li-Ion) and they could have been manufactured with the technologies of the early 1910-s. Zinc-air batteries can't be recharged in the usual sense, but zinc oxide can be reworked into the metal form easily.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  True, but it’s easy to imagine (to me!) an alternative past with battery replacement chariots etc.
- fwungy 3y ago
  Energy density is the issue. Gasoline has amazing energy density out of the box. Getting batteries anywhere near that may be impossible. Battery applications are critical. Tons of money has been spent on research. If there was something revolutionary to discover it's likely it would have happened. 100 mile EV town cars would be great, they'd be much less money than the long range EVs and target air pollution in the places that need it most. Trying to make EVs take over for ICEs via policy mandate is just insanity.
duck 3y ago
Most homes didn't have electricity at that time and wouldn't have it until the early 1930s.
aamoyg 3y ago
What about steam? Especially with Doble fast steam boilers?
chaostheory 3y ago
$1.5 million in 1914 is about $48 million dollars today
rkagerer 3y ago
If you like "what ifs" like this, you might enjoy For All Mankind which is a fictional show about an alternate history where the space race continued after Soviets beat the US to the moon.
thsksbd 3y ago
No. Gasoline cars have the advantage of not having to carry their own oxidizer. Even today, EVs make no sense at all compared to hybrids from a CO2 emissions stand point. Not only that, but the fundamentals of the thermo involved in ICEs were understood way before the electrochemistry thermo which lags thermal thermo by 50 to 100 years. Thats the theory; on the practical engineering side, by the time Goodenough was born in 1923, Sir Ricardo had figured everything we need to know about ICEs. Goodenough was working with late 20th (early 21st!!) century technology, Ricardo with turn of the 20th century tech.
nojvek 3y ago
From perspective of electric cars, the efficiency compared to ICE (combustion engine) cars is fantastic. 90%+ energy is used to move the car with electric motors, while only 30% is used in combustion engine, rest is losses in heat and friction. Modern electric cars can now also use regenerative braking which means brakes last a long time. The biggest downside of electric cars currently is the batteries. They 100x less gravimetric dense than gasoline/petrol. Gasoline has volumetric density of 34.2 MJ/L and gravimetric density of 45 MJ/kg. Cost about ~$1/L. A 50L tank has same energy as ~450 kWh battery weighing only ~40kg. Lithium ion batteries have volumetric density of ~1 MJ/L and gravimetric of 0.5 MJ/kg. A 450 kWh battery would weigh 3,240kg (3 tonnes!). We are gonna be addicted to gasoline for a while until we solve for an equivalent clean energy dense fuel that can be efficiently converted to electricity. -- In similar perspective, solar panels are now quite cheap (<$1/watt). The big problem is energy storage. Lithium batteries are still quite expensive, bulky and not much energy dense. Nature on the other hand has solved this problem millions of years ago. Natural solar panels (leaves) store energy in wood (mostly cellulose). Dry wood is ~20 MJ/kg and ~10MJ/L. Still >10X more dense than Li-ion batteries. -- Long range electric cars use most of the energy to move the heavy battery instead of the payload inside the car. Humans don't weigh much (~70kg). A tesla model Y has (~770kg) battery. That's 10X the weight of payload.
- theshrike79 3y ago
  Current Toyota models have engines with 40% efficiency: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/18919/toyota-develops-worlds-most-thermally-efficient-2-0-liter-engine https://www.thedrive.com/tech/18919/toyota-develops-worlds-m... But it's still under 50% of EV efficiency.
- Brian_K_White 3y ago
  Not to mention refill time. Not to mention safety.
  - DFHippie 3y ago
    According to this IEEE article, ICE fires are a greater danger than EV battery fires. https://spectrum.ieee.org/lithium-ion-battery-fires https://spectrum.ieee.org/lithium-ion-battery-fires Recharge time is not the problem as much as recharge frequency. I can go on long trips with my Tesla. I don't mind the recharge time -- it's a good chance to get a cup of coffee or take a bio break -- but their frequency is a little irksome (if you're being cautious to protect the battery life). But then, generally I'm traveling with at least one person who needs bio breaks pretty frequently, so it works out fine.
insecureforever 3y ago
The crux of the issue is missing on this entire conversation. The role of women, or perceived womanly roles, as this post shows, needs to take into consideration the plight of women during those times. Women's suffrage and the result of which we see in our current times is probably more an influence on the entire chain of thought here, in regards to the incredible advancement we see in gender roles we see now. The range and effectiveness of these vehicles, so desperately described as 'consistently improving with technology', misses the point entirely. So despite the current state of modern transportation/ technological advancement, we can now all see what apparently matters most to a (now) seemingly useless generation of educated 'opinionated specialists' pitifully beholden to their investors or large banks (this means you Tesla!), the reality of actual utility (such as farm use or manufacturing) can be seen on a grander scale, eg. A mass grid of indentured servants working a non-optimized routine for decades (might have overestimated their capabilities in that sense) vs customized electric tools (think handheld farming, perhaps each attached with it's own horn - not necessarily loud or aggressive but like those you see on clown cars), would they have eventually revolted against the machines/electric tools taking their place? Like the farm equipment of the past, obviously not the current capable tech we have to read about daily (for lack of better offerings), those indentured workers would likely be seen as no different to said farm equipment of the past. Their only outlet to vent their frustrations at their inabilty to escape their milieu wouldnt amount to much more than dainty gossip, or to take a term from reddit 'circle jerks' (probably with not much to jerk about), but perpetually useless against effecting any actual change to their plight, espousing their views as best they could. So at least some technical know-how would give them a voice! Workers rights have advanced leagues upon leagues in the past century. We can only learn from the past and apply those competitive (capitalistic!) tendencies and methodology to building better tech and actively avoid the same pitifalls.
emmelaich 3y ago
90pc of NY taxi cabs in 1899 were electric. ICE cars soon bettered them in sales because 1. range 2. speed 3. oil price - due to the discovery of large oil deposits in the USA. 4. initial cost - thanks to Henry Ford's innovations.
perryizgr8 3y ago
> gas cars at that period tended to be a little over 100 miles and the best electrics were 80 The difference is that it is downright trivial to add range to a petrol vehicle. Making the tank larger by 10 liters will add less than 10 kg of weight, but will increase range significantly. The same is not true of battery electrics.

raxxorraxor 3y ago

It should be noted that the environmental impact wasn't really known and the energy potential of fuels still is unmatched. From an engineering perspective with the information available at that time, the decision was probably "correct". Batteries were something like a necessary evil. For example to propel uboats because of the lack of oxygen. Otherwise the energy density and triviality of re-fuel-ing easily wins out.

KolmogorovComp 3y ago

This raise an interesting question. Is improving the battery tech an inherently more difficult problem than the efficiency of a thermic motor? I'd intuitively think so, as it's mostly chemical compared to mechanical work, and that would explain why thermic engine were favoured at the time. (On top of economic reasons)

usrusr 3y ago
If battery tech was easy and it only failed to progress faster due to lack of a well-funded use case, then submarine warfare should have brought us to Tesla-grade batteries in no time.
- nick222226 3y ago
  Fission batteries, baby!
  - Gare 3y ago
    Currently there are two land vehicles that drive with them :)
- fragmede 3y ago
  That did bring them nuclear reactors though. Hasn't helped my electricity come from nuclear.
  - Philip-J-Fry 3y ago
    That's the next step though. SMRs, Small Modular Reactors. Basically the same sort of thing that's in a submarine but dotted around our neighbourhoods and cities.
    - nradov 3y ago
      We are never, ever going to see SMRs dotted around our neighborhoods. I like the concept of nuclear power in general, but the security and terrorism concerns alone will kill any possibility of putting them in residential areas regardless of any potential economic benefits.
- __m 3y ago
  Panasonic-grade
avianlyric 3y ago

MBCook 3y ago

I had heard that Edison‘s batteries were subpar compared to other contemporaries. Which makes me wonder if things would’ve been different if Ford and Edison weren’t friends. But gasoline is so energy dense and at the time was so incredibly cheap I think it would’ve been a fight even if the batteries were better.

asdfsadfklj 3y ago

I don't think it would have been popular. Oil is very cheap $/potential energy and not range-limited in the same way EVs are. And even if you dumped trillions of $s in battery tech 100 years ago it's not clear it would be enough to really improve the situation.

emodendroket 3y ago

Given how central gasoline was to developments leading up to and during the Pacific War (like the role of the Dutch East Indies), history would change in all sorts of difficult-to-imagine ways.

hef19898 3y ago

The reason ICE cars won, is that electro motors got good enough to serve as starter motors for ICEs. Which is kind of ironic.

olyjohn 3y ago
Also if you wanted to travel a longer distance, you just threw a couple cans of fuel in the back. Neither electricity nor fuel stations were abundant, but extending the range using gas was dead nuts simple.
- berkes 3y ago
  It makes the assumption that in early 1900 people wanted or needed to travel far. Did they? Even today, most travels are under 100km, often averaging around <60km a day for commutes and less for non commutes. Would that have been different then? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that back then, when the car was replacing horse drawn carriers, on a very rudimentary infrastructure (no tarmac, no paved roads outside of City centers) it was even less.
  - toast0 3y ago
    It's not only about traveling long distances. It's about traveling short distances many times without refueling. And about recovering from using your fuel. It's easier to walk (or hitchhike) to a fueling station and carry a gallon or 5 of fuel back to your vehicle than it is to carry back a similar amount of electric charge. So you've got to move the vehicle somewhere it can charge --- not too hard today, electricity is near omnipresent and highly standardized in the developed world and mobile generators are common; but in the early 1900s, not so much. I imagine few people were regularly using personal vehicles for commuting at the dawn of cars, but cars and trucks are immensely useful to move goods. Rapid point to point transport of goods for routes beyond navagable waters and the rail network opens up a lot of opportunity for trade and doing business in more of the country. Note that cars can work with minimal infrastructure --- pavement is nice, but not required, although modern cars might not like it very much.

intrasight 3y ago

> ... battery technology would have progressed far more had the electric car been chosen rather than gas and how that would have meant all the investment into ... Replace gas/elecric with digital/analog. Is something I contemplated having studied neuroscience.

bee_rider 3y ago
I think I somewhat disagree, having studied EE, although I did get out on purpose, so maybe I am biased. Analog circuits can be a real pain, though. When the voltage means something, you actually have to get it right. With digital circuits, just smash it in the right direction as fast as possible. Get anywhere near Vdd and you have a 1, perfect!

sethev 3y ago

$1.5 million in 1912 is almost $50 million today, so he invested pretty heavily in electric before moving on. Without the benefit of hindsight, it's hard to imagine that going differently. I wonder if anyone at the time had an inkling of the long-term downsides of gasoline powered engines?

wredue 3y ago
Climate change predictions look to have “began” around 10 years after the first patent for gas vehicles, but predate mass production by a decade. There probably wasn’t widespread knowledge at the time of mass production. Then ~70 years ago, vehicle and oil giants absolutely knew what was happening and got the wheels spinning on a massive propaganda machine that continues to thrive today.
- collias 3y ago
  To be fair, I'm not sure choosing electric over gasoline cars at that time would have much effect on our current climate situation, assuming equal timelines for renewable tech. All those cars would have needed electricity from somewhere, and at the time, gasoline and coal were pretty cheap ways to generate it.
- Wytwwww 3y ago
  It's not like they had solar, wind or nuclear back then. Power was produced by burning coal which isn't that much better than burning gasoline.

toast0 3y ago

> I was trying to find the range of gas cars vs electric in 1912, and it looks like gas cars at that period tended to be a little over 100 miles and the best electrics were 80, with most at 50. It’s too bad the Model T wasn’t electric. It's pretty trivial to range extend a gas vehicle within reasonable limits. Gas cans had a lot of development (the shape and features of a modern metal gas can came together in the 1930s), but any container sturdy enough and sealable will work. In a model T, fuel was fed by gravity, so tank capacity is strongly limited by where you can put the tank. On a vehicle with a fuel pump, there would be more flexibility (my first car had a 33 gallon tank... if you combined that with a fuel efficient powertrain, the range would be huge)

jetbalsa 3y ago
and at the time of the Model T you could just about run them on anything with hydrocarbons in them with some adjustments. A electric car required infrastructure that just didn't exist at the time until after the Rural Electrification Act in 1936
- hunter2_ 3y ago
  > infrastructure that just didn't exist at the time until after the Rural Electrification Act in 1936 While not entirely critical I suppose, not getting stranded in an EV today also relies on much newer stuff as well, like the on board computer using cellular communications and GPS to help find a charging station within range of your destination. I imagine that in the absence of this assistance, the number of disabled EVs would be intolerably high, and delivering a can of gas is much simpler than delivering electricity or towing.
  - jetbalsa 3y ago
    also if the amount of EV charging stations was the same as the amount of gas stations we wouldn't have that issue as well. Early gas was bought at stores in cans most of the time, bulk pumping was just not very common.
berkes 3y ago

Teever 3y ago

I've had similar thoughts with regards to the development of solar panels. Imagine if America chose to respond to the 1973 oil embargo by investing tons of resources into the development of solar panels and made true energy independence a priority. We would be in a totally different position right now with regards to the climate and geopolitics.

CamperBob2 3y ago
We would've spent a lot of time hanging around local maxima in both cases. The development of both modern batteries and solar cells required advanced material science. No one was going to build a Model Y in 1950, or a 25%-efficient solar cell in 1970. EVs lost because gasoline is fucking awesome when considered solely as a means to transport energy and release it in a controlled manner. That's really all there is to it.
- Teever 3y ago
  Yeah, this is a thought I just had a few days ago and I've been meaning to look into what the bottle neck with regards to solar panels was. What sort of innovations in material science were needed to bring about the development of more efficient or affordable solar panels?
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    For solar cells, it was (according to Wikipedia) 1954 before the first practical PV cell was built. So that's already a late start. From there it seems that a lot of technologies had to develop in parallel, from larger silicon wafers to advances in understanding how to work with thin-film materials. Meanwhile, in the 1950s and 1960s nuclear power was going to be the Next Big Thing, and it was understandable that low-efficiency PV tech was of interest only for things like satellites. IMHO, the top-down energy policy managers that couldn't fulfill the "too cheap to meter" promises of nuclear power wouldn't have been up to the task of accelerating PV technology either. Solar cells are not like gas lasers, which could have been built in a neon-sign shop in the 1930s if the science needed to steer the technology had been in place. They are more like practical neural nets. Sure, they could have been built in the 1960s... if only GPUs weren't so darned hard to come by. (And as someone else suggested, any nation that began the 20th century by pouring the resources into PV cells and EVs that we put into fossil fuels wouldn't have lived to see the 21st.) Similar story for lithium batteries. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7215417/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7215417/ seems to be a decent survey of their evolutionary timeline. They consist of multiple discrete technologies. R&D that goes into a good cathode has to be done separately from work on anodes. Same for electrolytes and separators. Looking at the bibliography in that article, batteries don't seem like the sort of field where progress could have been accelerated just by throwing money at it, and I think that's true for PV tech as well.

bee_rider 3y ago

It might have resulted in a better world, less oil consumption and all that. But who knows? I wouldn’t be surprised if the solution they came up with was to just use some slow charging tech and swap them at the battery-station. Hand over your spent battery to the local attendant, he’ll either bring it in and pay some recycling fee or chuck it in a nearby creek for free.

Wytwwww 3y ago
> It might have resulted in a better world, less oil consumption and all that. Considering pretty much all power back then was produced by burning coal and that lead acid batteries are not exactly environmentally friendly it's not that obvious.
bear141 3y ago
This is the tech that most Asian motorcycle manufacturers have recently agreed upon for interchangeable batteries without charging wait times.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  That’s interesting. Is there some plan in the agreement to prevent people from ending up with beat up old batteries?

aetherson 3y ago

This is really divorced from reality. There was just no way at all that electric cars would've been viable in the 20th Century. No, we wouldn't magically have developed modern computer-controlled battery packs of lithium ion batteries in 1920 if we just wanted it hard enough.

resoluteteeth 3y ago
I'm sure the performance wouldn't have been comparable to modern electric cars, but what if car companies in 1920 had focused on producing electric cars that had a shorter range with a lower top speed? It's not like people were commuting 60 miles each way on highways in 1920, and I doubt model t's were actually normally hitting their theoretical top speed anyway.
- deleted 3y ago
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- notahacker 3y ago
  > I'm sure the performance wouldn't have been comparable to modern electric cars, but what if car companies in 1920 had focused on producing electric cars that had a shorter range with a lower top speed? They'd have been outcompeted by the cars with longer range and higher speed (and no reliance on lead acid batteries that must have horribly degraded with intensive use), just like they were in the 1910s. It's not like they weren't tried: the tech had a longer history than the ICE and they actually outsold the ICE in the US in the first decade of the twentieth century
JesseObrien 3y ago
>No, we wouldn't magically have developed modern computer-controlled battery packs of lithium ion batteries in 1920 if we just wanted it hard enough. That's not what the commenter said. Don't put your interpretation of the words into theirs. It is very feasible that the investment of 100-some-odd years of battery research and a marked non-future invested as deeply into oil and gas as we have now would have rendered our entire world vastly different. This is not a claim that the future would have happened sooner, but rather the events that unfolded and the research would have been different.

mrtksn 3y ago

I recall reading somewhere that the ICE took off because there were quite a lot of low hanging fruits and a path with less resistance, thus it let faster progress towards the desirable properties of a car. For example, it's way easier to move around a can of fuel rather than being limited to an electric grid in a time when electricity and proper roads were not ubiquitous yet. I imagine it would have been too limiting to need to bring the car somewhere specific to re-charge when you are still trying to figure out what this automobile thing is good for. Is it good at the farm for example? Can't tell with the electric car if you don't have electricity at the farm.

theodric 3y ago
Furthermore, it's a lot easier to carry an equivalent amount of energy in petrochemical form vs the primitive lead-acid batteries of the day, long before hyper-optimized computer controlled motors were available to wring every last milliwatthour of efficiency out of them. And now increase distances and therefore desirable speeds corresponding with the growth of population, and it becomes more and more impractical to use electricity for personal transport in the years after 1912. I think viable electric cars landed about when they became practicable. Lead-acid absolutely shits the bed rapidly if discharged below FIFTY percent SoC, so take your kWh rating and cut it in half straight away. And remember that you're carrying around a ton of wet lead to achieve that. Not great. NiCd is crap, NiMH is better but not overwhelmingly so, and lead-acid can deliver a lot more current. Li-ion, then? Remember how rubbish laptop battery max charge cycle lifetimes were in 1999? The battery lasts maybe a year of regular use, and then it's shot and the laptop runs for 30 seconds and powers off. And it costs $300 to replace. Now make it 200x the size and put it in a car you use for your daily commute and get ready to spend BMW money annually on new Li-ion. The improvements in battery tech in just the last 15 years are really something to behold, and not coincidentally that's when Tesla was able to start shipping compelling vehicles. Now somebody tell me why I'm wrong ;-)
- jacquesm 3y ago
  > Now somebody tell me why I'm wrong ;-) If you insist: electric motors have always been far more efficient than their ICE counterparts. 80% is easy, 90% is doable. 95% and up requires more tricks and even regular EVs don't bother because they might as well use some of that waste heat to heat the pack or the interior of the vehicle.

PKop 3y ago

Any nation pursuing this would have been dominated geopolitically, militarily, and economically by those that just took advantage of cheaper and more productive use of combustion engines.

HPsquared 3y ago
Yep.. It's game theory, always has been.
deleted 3y ago
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ajross 3y ago

> battery technology would have progressed far more Seems unlikely. The core innovation behind lithium cells is polymer chemistry that didn't exist until the 80's. There might have been a market to drive adoption, but it still needs to wait for the science.

cornholio 3y ago

> battery technology would have progressed far more had the electric car been chosen This seems unlikely. There were major industrial and military uses for rechargeable batteries throughout the 20th century. Things like submarines, portable electronics, stationary fallback for critical services (phone exchanges) etc., all added up to a substantial economic interest in battery technology. The Nikel-Cadmium chemistry was known since 1899, but the materials and production process were considered too expensive to make them practical until mid 20th century. Advanced processing such as powder sintering to increase area were simply unknown at the time when the ICE vs EV competition was in play. By the 1920s, the ICE and petrol fueled cars were capable of ranges and fuel economies we can barely reach even today with Lithium batteries, a technology that became possible only in the 70s, taking advantage of substantial lateral progress in material and chemical science. A hypothetical world of electric vehicles would have spurred battery sales and investment by an order of magnitude or so, but the actual effects in hastening productization of high density cells would have probably been marginal and below what was required to win against the ICE, disproving the hypothesis. You can see this diminishing return of research at work today where, despite the order of magnitude increase in the battery market, progress is very still sluggish, pitted against hard, physical limits.

cyberax 3y ago
> This seems unlikely. There were major industrial and military uses for rechargeable batteries throughout the 20th century. But there are non-rechargable batteries. Zinc-air batteries have around 600 Wh/kg energy density (3 times more than Li-Ion) and they could have been manufactured with the technologies of the early 1910-s. Zinc-air batteries can't be recharged in the usual sense, but zinc oxide can be reworked into the metal form easily.
actionfromafar 3y ago
True, but it’s easy to imagine (to me!) an alternative past with battery replacement chariots etc.
fwungy 3y ago
Energy density is the issue. Gasoline has amazing energy density out of the box. Getting batteries anywhere near that may be impossible. Battery applications are critical. Tons of money has been spent on research. If there was something revolutionary to discover it's likely it would have happened. 100 mile EV town cars would be great, they'd be much less money than the long range EVs and target air pollution in the places that need it most. Trying to make EVs take over for ICEs via policy mandate is just insanity.

duck 3y ago

Most homes didn't have electricity at that time and wouldn't have it until the early 1930s.

aamoyg 3y ago

What about steam? Especially with Doble fast steam boilers?

chaostheory 3y ago

$1.5 million in 1914 is about $48 million dollars today

rkagerer 3y ago

If you like "what ifs" like this, you might enjoy For All Mankind which is a fictional show about an alternate history where the space race continued after Soviets beat the US to the moon.

thsksbd 3y ago

No. Gasoline cars have the advantage of not having to carry their own oxidizer. Even today, EVs make no sense at all compared to hybrids from a CO2 emissions stand point. Not only that, but the fundamentals of the thermo involved in ICEs were understood way before the electrochemistry thermo which lags thermal thermo by 50 to 100 years. Thats the theory; on the practical engineering side, by the time Goodenough was born in 1923, Sir Ricardo had figured everything we need to know about ICEs. Goodenough was working with late 20th (early 21st!!) century technology, Ricardo with turn of the 20th century tech.

nojvek 3y ago

From perspective of electric cars, the efficiency compared to ICE (combustion engine) cars is fantastic. 90%+ energy is used to move the car with electric motors, while only 30% is used in combustion engine, rest is losses in heat and friction. Modern electric cars can now also use regenerative braking which means brakes last a long time. The biggest downside of electric cars currently is the batteries. They 100x less gravimetric dense than gasoline/petrol. Gasoline has volumetric density of 34.2 MJ/L and gravimetric density of 45 MJ/kg. Cost about ~$1/L. A 50L tank has same energy as ~450 kWh battery weighing only ~40kg. Lithium ion batteries have volumetric density of ~1 MJ/L and gravimetric of 0.5 MJ/kg. A 450 kWh battery would weigh 3,240kg (3 tonnes!). We are gonna be addicted to gasoline for a while until we solve for an equivalent clean energy dense fuel that can be efficiently converted to electricity. -- In similar perspective, solar panels are now quite cheap (<$1/watt). The big problem is energy storage. Lithium batteries are still quite expensive, bulky and not much energy dense. Nature on the other hand has solved this problem millions of years ago. Natural solar panels (leaves) store energy in wood (mostly cellulose). Dry wood is ~20 MJ/kg and ~10MJ/L. Still >10X more dense than Li-ion batteries. -- Long range electric cars use most of the energy to move the heavy battery instead of the payload inside the car. Humans don't weigh much (~70kg). A tesla model Y has (~770kg) battery. That's 10X the weight of payload.

theshrike79 3y ago
Current Toyota models have engines with 40% efficiency: https://www.thedrive.com/tech/18919/toyota-develops-worlds-most-thermally-efficient-2-0-liter-engine https://www.thedrive.com/tech/18919/toyota-develops-worlds-m... But it's still under 50% of EV efficiency.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
Not to mention refill time. Not to mention safety.
- DFHippie 3y ago
  According to this IEEE article, ICE fires are a greater danger than EV battery fires. https://spectrum.ieee.org/lithium-ion-battery-fires https://spectrum.ieee.org/lithium-ion-battery-fires Recharge time is not the problem as much as recharge frequency. I can go on long trips with my Tesla. I don't mind the recharge time -- it's a good chance to get a cup of coffee or take a bio break -- but their frequency is a little irksome (if you're being cautious to protect the battery life). But then, generally I'm traveling with at least one person who needs bio breaks pretty frequently, so it works out fine.

insecureforever 3y ago

The crux of the issue is missing on this entire conversation. The role of women, or perceived womanly roles, as this post shows, needs to take into consideration the plight of women during those times. Women's suffrage and the result of which we see in our current times is probably more an influence on the entire chain of thought here, in regards to the incredible advancement we see in gender roles we see now. The range and effectiveness of these vehicles, so desperately described as 'consistently improving with technology', misses the point entirely. So despite the current state of modern transportation/ technological advancement, we can now all see what apparently matters most to a (now) seemingly useless generation of educated 'opinionated specialists' pitifully beholden to their investors or large banks (this means you Tesla!), the reality of actual utility (such as farm use or manufacturing) can be seen on a grander scale, eg. A mass grid of indentured servants working a non-optimized routine for decades (might have overestimated their capabilities in that sense) vs customized electric tools (think handheld farming, perhaps each attached with it's own horn - not necessarily loud or aggressive but like those you see on clown cars), would they have eventually revolted against the machines/electric tools taking their place? Like the farm equipment of the past, obviously not the current capable tech we have to read about daily (for lack of better offerings), those indentured workers would likely be seen as no different to said farm equipment of the past. Their only outlet to vent their frustrations at their inabilty to escape their milieu wouldnt amount to much more than dainty gossip, or to take a term from reddit 'circle jerks' (probably with not much to jerk about), but perpetually useless against effecting any actual change to their plight, espousing their views as best they could. So at least some technical know-how would give them a voice! Workers rights have advanced leagues upon leagues in the past century. We can only learn from the past and apply those competitive (capitalistic!) tendencies and methodology to building better tech and actively avoid the same pitifalls.

emmelaich 3y ago

90pc of NY taxi cabs in 1899 were electric. ICE cars soon bettered them in sales because 1. range 2. speed 3. oil price - due to the discovery of large oil deposits in the USA. 4. initial cost - thanks to Henry Ford's innovations.

perryizgr8 3y ago

> gas cars at that period tended to be a little over 100 miles and the best electrics were 80 The difference is that it is downright trivial to add range to a petrol vehicle. Making the tank larger by 10 liters will add less than 10 kg of weight, but will increase range significantly. The same is not true of battery electrics.