The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History (review)

The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History. By David A. Kirsch. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. Pp. xiii+291. $20.

It is a relief to read a history of the electric automobile that does not seem written by the California Air Resources Board. David Kirsch has given us a well-researched, well-illustrated (as a geographer, I am happy to see maps), and lively account of the development of electric vehicle technology. He admits up front that "there is no such thing as an environmentally friendly automobile technology" (p. 6). Unfortunately, Kirsch has not given us a full account of the ways in which the first users of the automobile saw different propulsion technologies as constraining or liberating and made choices about those technologies, or the way technologies developed to suit changing market conditions. Some blame for these deficiencies can be placed on the committee that oversaw an earlier version of this work as a dissertation at Stanford University: more, however, must devolve on the external reviewers of the manuscript and the editors at Rutgers University Press.

Kirsch has admirably mined the trade literature of the early twentieth century that supported the emergence of electric vehicle technology. Had the book rested here, I would pat Kirsch and his committee on the back, make the obligatory comments about a book that can stand on the library shelf for all time, and be done. Unfortunately someone, somewhere could not resist the temptation to embellish.

The problem is immediately evident. Kirsch draws a totally misleading analogy by claiming that the choice of power plant for the automobile was akin to the choice between "VHS and Betamax" (p. 4). Since Matsushita's VHS succeeded through superior licensing and marketing, not superior technology, this implies that the internal combustion engine had no real technological margin over electrics. Nonsense. Kirsch recognizes the advantages of internal combustion, but never lays out the comparative advantages and disadvantages of the competing technologies. The careful reader can put this material together. A competent external reviewer or editor would have insisted that this was the author's job.

Several questions asked by Kirsch remain unanswered. Most serious is why electrics failed so dismally. Kirsch does his best to evade the traditional answer that the energy density of the storage battery is very much less than that of petroleum, and fails. He also fails to be clear on the issue of range, claiming that, since nearly all vehicles were used in cities, range was irrelevant. His case for the electric truck is convincing, but trucks operated out and back from a fixed charging base and their maintenance was carefully controlled. On social issues Kirsch's technical focus lets him down. Articles in such contemporary magazines as Country Life in America made the link to range self-evident. The Paris-Peking race of 1907 and the New York-Paris race of 1908 glamorized range. Gasoline was available everywhere. Automobiles shifted rapidly from toys for the elite, in which the electric might have had a role to play, to status symbols for the upwardly mobile. By 1907 automobile racing attracted huge crowds. By 1908 Oldsmobile had discovered that the long, phallic hood of the gasoline automobile screamed sexual power. Market capitalism began to shape future technology. By 1910 the most evocative of all early advertisements had appeared, an Oldsmobile "Limited" racing and beating the New York Central's "Twentieth Century Limited." Beautiful people could not race and beat express trains in emasculated electric runabouts.

A second failure is of context. What racing began, agriculture and World War I finished. Diesel engines generate electricity in many a small town to this day. John Deere is as much a reason we drive internal combustion vehicles as is Henry Ford. No one has made an electric aircraft or electric tank. No one can explain the failure of the electric automobile outside such a context.

A third failure is to comprehensively examine...