The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age (review)

One principle that can usefully animate research in the history of technology is that "success" and "failure" are terms that require explanation and qualification. So it should be with the history of the electric car, which until recently has been guided by an implicit invocation of Darwinist evolution: battery-powered vehicles had self-evident technical shortcomings that doomed them to failure when they were thrown into competition with the internal combustion engine.

In The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age, Gijs Mom reveals the complexity of the actual story through a detailed account of the early history of automotive transportation in the United States and several European countries. As the book's title makes clear, the subject is the electric vehicle, not just the electric passenger car; four of the seven chapters and significant portions of other chapters are devoted to electric taxis, delivery trucks, fire engines, and street sweepers. This wider compass allows Mom to demonstrate areas of success for electric propulsion that contrast with the inability of the electric passenger car to gain a significant share of the automobile market. At certain times and in certain places, some electric vehicles enjoyed a fair measure of success, incurring lower operating costs and outnumbering their gasoline-powered rivals by considerable margins.

To a considerable extent, the viability of electric vehicles depended on the existence of adequate maintenance facilities. During the first decade of the twentieth century and a bit beyond, commercial electric vehicles in a number of cities were well supported by centralized charging facilities employing procedures that allowed discharged batteries to be replaced in less time than it took to fill a gas tank. One the other hand, central electrical generation plants in the United States, potentially vital contributors to the widespread use of electric vehicles, were at best lukewarm in their support, in part due to the high capital expenditures needed to set up charging stations. One can only speculate on what might have happened if the electrical generating industry had showed as much interest in electric cars as in promoting kitchen appliances and heating systems.

Considerations of this sort take us only so far. The competition between the electric car and its gasoline-fueled alternative was also shaped by forces other than calculations of comparative costs, maintenance requirements, and operating efficiencies. As Mom notes early in his book, nonrational influences have always loomed large in choices made about vehicles. The "adventure machine," as Mom dubs the gasoline-powered automobile, offered its owners at least the prospect of an escape from quotidian existence, while the electric's inability to combine speed with range marked its virtues as hopelessly utilitarian. Early electrics were easier to drive and more reliable than cars powered by internal combustion engines, but when owning and driving an automobile could be an occasion for adventure, imperfections and eccentricities could even be viewed as virtues.

Ironically, the subsequent "domestication" of the gasoline automobile owed much to the standards set by electric cars, with their exemplary smoothness, quietness, and ease of operation, a process that culminated in the invention and rapid diffusion of the electric starter. Mom points out that electric vehicles also provided an important stimulus for the development of an essential component of reliable automotive transportation, the bias-ply tires that were originally developed to compensate for the great weight of the batteries used by electric vehicles.

Batteries always loom large in any discussion of electric vehicles, but Mom provides a more subtle treatment of the issue than most histories of the auto's formative years. While providing quite a lot of information about the development of battery technology and noting the perennial hope that a "miracle battery" would eventually emerge, Mom also makes the important observation that embedded in this fixation on the battery is the assumption that electrics had to be evaluated against the standards set by vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. As much as anything, it...