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

Automotive historians have long dismissed the electric vehicle; who would want a car with limited speed that had to be recharged every hundred miles? But in 1905, Gijs Mom reminds us, "more than half of all commercial vehicles in the United States were electric powered," and by 1940 tens of thousands of electric cars and trucks had been produced (pp. 206, 265). In the United States and Europe, electric vehicles appeared as taxicabs, delivery vans, and even fire engines, as well as private automobiles. Why, then, did this technology emerge, and why did it perish? David A. Kirsch has done much to answer these questions in the American context, in The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History (New Brunswick, N.J. 2000).

Now Mom, Kirsch's sometime collaborator, presents the international perspective. Mom has mined the archives of several countries, uncovering manuscript and published sources in four languages, to produce a model comparative history. His main focus is the United States and Germany, but he follows electric vehicles to Britain, France, and the Netherlands, with side trips to other European countries. The result is a stunning compilation of examples and figures, ranging from Chicago to Berlin and from race cars to milk trucks.

Based on this mountain of evidence, Mom makes four arguments. The first is that for a wide variety of uses, electric vehicles were superior to their gasoline counterparts, which Mom finds "noisy, unhygienic, and unreliable" (p. 13). True, he concedes, electrics were limited in range and speed, but neither property is crucial in a "city car," and it was the cities rather than the countryside that became the first great market for automobiles. This argument is strained. Mom's own detailed account of the evolution of batteries shows that early batteries needed difficult, dangerous maintenance. Improved versions, after 1910, still required skill to charge properly and fell apart after five months, even if they were not used heavily. Less powerful than gasoline cars, electrics could not use the sturdiest pneumatic tires, requiring instead fragile substitutes that blew easily. Under the circumstances, the individual purchaser of a car or truck who occasionally took a long trip was better off with a gasoline engine.

Mom makes a somewhat stronger case for fleets of electric taxicabs and urban trucks. City drivers valued the electric's easy stops and starts, and city governments applauded its lack of noise and odor. For delivery vans and street cleaners, as well as for employers who discouraged joyriding, slow speed was actually a requirement. Vehicles could be maintained and charged by experts at central garages and kept in constant use to get the most out of short-lived batteries. But even for city-based fleets, range was a problem, since electric taxis and fire engines could not serve growing suburbs. Moreover, reliable operation depended on complicated business and technical organization. As a result, when fleet managers had a free choice of propulsion, they generally opted for internal combustion. Only when local governments favored electric vehicles with preferential laws, or when the fleet owner was itself an electric-power company, did electric fleets last long. The final blow was World War I, which left both Europe and America with factories tooled to churn out hundreds of thousands of cheap, standardized gasoline trucks, as well as with armies of men trained to drive them.

Mom's third argument is that the electric vehicle's real success was in raising the bar for its gasoline rivals. "Competing technologies," he writes, "in trying to be more attractive in the marketplace, tend to borrow (or steal) each other's properties and functions" (p. 5). In this case, electric manufacturers tried to imitate the gasoline car, complete with a hood to cover an absent engine. But the gasoline-car makers copied even more, introducing electric starters and closed-car construction to make driving an internal combustion machine as comfortable as an electric. It is...