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.”
> 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.
You need lithium chemistry to be competitive and that requires nano level understanding of the anode/cathode crystal structure. That essentially requires quantum mechanics which wasn't even a thing during the two decades when steam, electric, and gas/diesel were fighting for supremacy. Not to mention the manufacturing tolerances required to get reasonable diffusion rates which is the major limiting factor for charge/discharge rates (and a large component of temperature sensitivity).
You might make the case that steam power would have dominated until the 40s-60s if the Doble-style steam generator had been available in say 1890. By the time they figured out how to make useful steam cars gasoline had already won.
For the curious: the Doble-style system uses a steam tube that flashes water instantly to steam - not unlike instant hot water heaters but for steam. They also used condensers so the steam was cooled by a radiator, condensed, and the water re-used. Often paired with a double or triple expansion piston and an aux piston to run an electric generator for accessories. In these cars you turned the key and within 10-30 seconds you can drive away. No need to warm up a boiler and no large tank that might explode. And no water loss so no need to fill up on water either. They could essentially burn almost anything flammable. Steam also has instant full torque at any speed similar to an EV. But it was all developed far too late to matter.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I've always felt like farms should be able to have another route to electrification, because you're dealing with the same set of fields in a constrained geography for years at a time.
Like, why go battery-heavy at all? Why not design some sort of EVA-like tether to a utility pole in each set of fields? Hook up your equipment when you enter the fields, spend 8-12 hours driving back and forth attached to the tether, unhook and use a small battery -- or even a battery-trailer -- to reach the next field or the barn at the end of the day.
Obviously there are problems with this scheme, but the point I'm getting at is that field work is such a radically different set of constraints to interstate, city or even rail networks that it feels like there should be a different set of solutions possible.
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.
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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.
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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.
As Tesla 3 owner with a $4000 bill for a scrape under the passenger door at 1MPH navigating a tight carpark I will tell you there are definitely a few more things they need to get right.
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.
> 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)
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
> It's pretty trivial to range extend a gas vehicle within reasonable limits. Gas cans...
gas cans!? the way we generally range extend a gas vehicle is to pull into a gas station and a couple minutes later you're on your way again.
For electrics, gas cans would be additional heavy batteries, while filling stations have the longer refill time, which can fit your schedule (recharge while at work) or not (stop to recharge every few hours on a long drive).
(please don't all start telling me about quick charging and a list of neat things to do while you wait and how the mindfulness is overall better. I'm just making a comment about available means to extend the range of a car)
in the transition phase (horse to car), a farmer with a model T could use a horse and buggy to bring a gas can to a stalled car. Would have to tow the battery car to where there is electricity and a rectifier. Look up "rural electrification program" to see how little electricity there was in the hinterlands at that time.
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.
Ford sold a couple of million Model Ts (and gave up on his electric car project with Edison) before offering an electric starter motor as an option. The advantage of ICEs at the time was massive even if you had to hand crank the engine.
$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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
I don’t think it so much that battery chemistry is so hard to improve, but rather the energy density of oil is so high, you don’t simply don’t need an efficient thermic motor to do useful work.
If you completely ignore the externalities of oil (which we did for a very long time). Then it’s very hard for an electric battery to compete with diesel or gasoline. Gasoline has an energy density of about 46MJ/Kg, compared to a lithium ion battery at just 0.9MJ/Kg and that’s a modern battery. A lead acid battery is just 0.15MJ/Kg.
So right out of the gate, your thermic motor can be two orders of magnitude less efficient than your electric motor, and still achieve the same range with an equivalent mass of stored energy. And that’s ignoring the fact the thermic engine burns its fuel, so does more useful work as the mass of stored energy drops.
To be quite honest, it’s astounding to me that electric traction was even remotely competitive with thermic traction back in Henry Fords era. The head start thermic engines get from such high density fuel is kind of obscene.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
I think when it comes to electric vehicles. The big issue was the batteries. It's a hard problem. Probably too hard for the science and technology 100 years ago. It's one hard problem after another. I worked with some lithium primary cells in the mid 80's. They were amazeballs and terrifying. They had an internal 4 amp fuse for safety.
But solar, I think we really under invested. My semi-trollish comment is if we invested as much in solar as we did for nuclear we'd be 30 years ahead. Trollish because it upsets people with an emotional attachment to nuclear. But it's also flat out true. The technology was rapidly developed in the 50's and 60's but no one spent the money to mass manufacture them until early 2000's.
Imagine if America chose to respond to the 1973 oil embargo by investing tons of resources into the development of horizontal drilling and fracking. Because that is what has given us true energy independence right now.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> ... 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.
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!
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.
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.
One thing about these early electric cars that gets overlooked is how primitive their motors were.
Yes, induction motors existed then because Nikola Tesla had invented them, but they couldn't be used in a car because they required AC. So cars were stuck with brushed DC motors. Those work but they're not maximally efficient and the brushes eventually wear out and need to be replaced.
Today we use efficient induction and brushless DC motors in cars, and those are only possible because we have cheap power electronics that can chop up a DC voltage into an AC waveform of arbitrary complexity with fine precision. Power electronics didn't exist until the 1960s, and they only got cheap in the 1990s.
I don't know how efficient brushed DC motors were. Nowadays, I see 80% efficiency, it was probably lower back then, plus, you probably had to have some kind of transmission, maybe it couldn't run at the optimal regime, etc... So let's say 50%.
Pretty terrible compared to modern engines that are >90% but that's just about twice more "fuel". Not negligible, but fairly small compared to everything else.
As for the brushes, they are cheap carbon rods. I guess that on a car, it would be like changing the brake pads. Not much, especially compared to the amount of maintenance cars needed at the time.
Compare to early internal combustion engines that were about 5% efficiency in the early 1900s and have steadily increased to almost 40% today. That's 8 times!
So yeah, their electric engines were primitive, but their gas engines were even more so, the that would have been in favor of electric.
edit: Nikola Tesla is credited with inventing many things he did not invent. He was very skilled and prolific at patenting his improvements on existing inventions, though.
He didn't think it up in the first place and he wasn't the first person who built one, but he got several patents e.g. [0] on the idea and his designs were the first commercially successful ones in the United States. Westinghouse and others then improved the idea further, and Italians would probably take a different view of all the above.
Tesla made induction motors practical.
I don't think it's wrong to say (informally, to a first approximation) that Tesla invented the induction motor. Edison didn't think up the light bulb either, but by virtue of making light bulbs practical it's not wrong to refer to him informally as the "inventor" of the light bulb.
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, the guy who invented the electrolytic capacitor, also patented the field-effect transistor in 1930. But he never made one, material science just wasn't there yet. (This is why the Nobel for "inventing the transistor" went to a completely different team who were using a different method 17 years later) Power electronics requires the whole suite of semiconductor technology: atomically pure silicon crystals, dopants, vacuum coating, lithography, etc. First VFD motor controller wasn't until 1982.
The technology wasn't even remotely ready yet in 1912. Remember, the GM EV1 of 1996, with VFD drive and NiMH batteries that didn't exist and couldn't exist in 1912, still only managed a hundred miles of range. Despite the conspiracy theories, the EV1 wasn't a very compelling car. It required better batteries and motors to get something like a Tesla a decade later.
I've had the pleasure of riding in a Baker Electric Car. Very cool - one of my favorite antiques I've ever ridden in.
It's worth pointing out that the early electric cars were almost exclusively sold to women. Early cars were messy and dangerous, and a safe easy-to-operate car was often bought by the wealthy to give to their wives. It ended up being the advent of the electric starter that killed the early electric cars more than anything. (Breaking your thumb hand cranking a car was a very common occurrence previously).
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Glad to see copyfraud alive and well on Public Domain Day.
Fully charged show did an episode on this car (or maybe just this era.) either way, I found it interesting to see the similarities in design to todays evs considering how early so many of these concepts were.
Interestingly, these were capable of 30-40 miles of range on a single charge (essentially the same range you get with modern Plug-in Electric Hybrids on battery power)
For others that also don't know what a rectifier is:
> A rectifier is an electrical device that converts alternating current (AC), which periodically reverses direction, to direct current (DC), which flows in only one direction. The reverse operation (converting DC to AC) is performed by an inverter.
Only reason why electric cars existed back then is because gas engine had to be hand-cranked before electric starter was invented in 1911. People hated doing it because it was dangerous and dirty. Especially women.
As soon as electric starter became a thing, electric cars were dead. Their usage continued only with delivery vans for some time as gas engines were still unreliable and for delivery fleets, dispatch reliability was very important.
Properly dangerous in case people dont realize this. This wasnt people being squeamish.
>In the winter of 1908, a woman stalled her Cadillac in Belle Island, Michigan, and didn't have the strength to crank the car over. So she sat there. Another driver by the name of Byron Carter happened along and offered to start the stalled Cadillac. Carter was the founder of CarterCar, which was acquired by GM in 1909, largely due to the company's development work with friction transmissions. Carter was also a friend of Cadillac founder Henry Leland.
>When Carter turned the stalled Cadillac's crank, the engine reportedly backfired, the crank hit him in the face and broke his jaw. Tragically, gangrene set in, and, medicine being what it was at the turn of the last century, Carter died later that year.
Even for delivery vehicles the petrol engine was way better. One anecdote from some documentary that stuck with me is:
Delivery vehicles (post/milkman) had to do the uphill people first as the batteries did not have enough power to get the car up the hill at the end of a day.
Well, it was before gender equity and women certainly didn't want to look unlady-like having to crank up their cars in the street. Also, as another commenter said, backfiring engine could traumatise a person holding a crank. Horror stories like death from a broken jaw were an extreme rarity, but broken fingers were pretty much normal, and could ruin young woman's marriage prospects given how badly disfigured could fingers become given medical tech of the time.
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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-mod...
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.
You might make the case that steam power would have dominated until the 40s-60s if the Doble-style steam generator had been available in say 1890. By the time they figured out how to make useful steam cars gasoline had already won.
For the curious: the Doble-style system uses a steam tube that flashes water instantly to steam - not unlike instant hot water heaters but for steam. They also used condensers so the steam was cooled by a radiator, condensed, and the water re-used. Often paired with a double or triple expansion piston and an aux piston to run an electric generator for accessories. In these cars you turned the key and within 10-30 seconds you can drive away. No need to warm up a boiler and no large tank that might explode. And no water loss so no need to fill up on water either. They could essentially burn almost anything flammable. Steam also has instant full torque at any speed similar to an EV. But it was all developed far too late to matter.
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.
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.
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.
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 ;-)
Like, why go battery-heavy at all? Why not design some sort of EVA-like tether to a utility pole in each set of fields? Hook up your equipment when you enter the fields, spend 8-12 hours driving back and forth attached to the tether, unhook and use a small battery -- or even a battery-trailer -- to reach the next field or the barn at the end of the day.
Obviously there are problems with this scheme, but the point I'm getting at is that field work is such a radically different set of constraints to interstate, city or even rail networks that it feels like there should be a different set of solutions possible.
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.
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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.
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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.
But it's still under 50% of EV efficiency.
Not to mention safety.
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.
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)
But it doesn't make the question "where would we be now, if the choice had been made different" less interesting.
gas cans!? the way we generally range extend a gas vehicle is to pull into a gas station and a couple minutes later you're on your way again.
For electrics, gas cans would be additional heavy batteries, while filling stations have the longer refill time, which can fit your schedule (recharge while at work) or not (stop to recharge every few hours on a long drive).
(please don't all start telling me about quick charging and a list of neat things to do while you wait and how the mindfulness is overall better. I'm just making a comment about available means to extend the range of a car)
in the transition phase (horse to car), a farmer with a model T could use a horse and buggy to bring a gas can to a stalled car. Would have to tow the battery car to where there is electricity and a rectifier. Look up "rural electrification program" to see how little electricity there was in the hinterlands at that time.
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I wonder if anyone at the time had an inkling of the long-term downsides of gasoline powered engines?
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.
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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.
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)
If you completely ignore the externalities of oil (which we did for a very long time). Then it’s very hard for an electric battery to compete with diesel or gasoline. Gasoline has an energy density of about 46MJ/Kg, compared to a lithium ion battery at just 0.9MJ/Kg and that’s a modern battery. A lead acid battery is just 0.15MJ/Kg.
So right out of the gate, your thermic motor can be two orders of magnitude less efficient than your electric motor, and still achieve the same range with an equivalent mass of stored energy. And that’s ignoring the fact the thermic engine burns its fuel, so does more useful work as the mass of stored energy drops.
To be quite honest, it’s astounding to me that electric traction was even remotely competitive with thermic traction back in Henry Fords era. The head start thermic engines get from such high density fuel is kind of obscene.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
But solar, I think we really under invested. My semi-trollish comment is if we invested as much in solar as we did for nuclear we'd be 30 years ahead. Trollish because it upsets people with an emotional attachment to nuclear. But it's also flat out true. The technology was rapidly developed in the 50's and 60's but no one spent the money to mass manufacture them until early 2000's.
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.
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.
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.
Replace gas/elecric with digital/analog. Is something I contemplated having studied neuroscience.
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!
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.
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.
Yes, induction motors existed then because Nikola Tesla had invented them, but they couldn't be used in a car because they required AC. So cars were stuck with brushed DC motors. Those work but they're not maximally efficient and the brushes eventually wear out and need to be replaced.
Today we use efficient induction and brushless DC motors in cars, and those are only possible because we have cheap power electronics that can chop up a DC voltage into an AC waveform of arbitrary complexity with fine precision. Power electronics didn't exist until the 1960s, and they only got cheap in the 1990s.
Pretty terrible compared to modern engines that are >90% but that's just about twice more "fuel". Not negligible, but fairly small compared to everything else.
As for the brushes, they are cheap carbon rods. I guess that on a car, it would be like changing the brake pads. Not much, especially compared to the amount of maintenance cars needed at the time.
Compare to early internal combustion engines that were about 5% efficiency in the early 1900s and have steadily increased to almost 40% today. That's 8 times!
So yeah, their electric engines were primitive, but their gas engines were even more so, the that would have been in favor of electric.
edit: Nikola Tesla is credited with inventing many things he did not invent. He was very skilled and prolific at patenting his improvements on existing inventions, though.
Tesla made induction motors practical.
I don't think it's wrong to say (informally, to a first approximation) that Tesla invented the induction motor. Edison didn't think up the light bulb either, but by virtue of making light bulbs practical it's not wrong to refer to him informally as the "inventor" of the light bulb.
[0] https://patents.google.com/patent/US405858
The technology wasn't even remotely ready yet in 1912. Remember, the GM EV1 of 1996, with VFD drive and NiMH batteries that didn't exist and couldn't exist in 1912, still only managed a hundred miles of range. Despite the conspiracy theories, the EV1 wasn't a very compelling car. It required better batteries and motors to get something like a Tesla a decade later.
It's worth pointing out that the early electric cars were almost exclusively sold to women. Early cars were messy and dangerous, and a safe easy-to-operate car was often bought by the wealthy to give to their wives. It ended up being the advent of the electric starter that killed the early electric cars more than anything. (Breaking your thumb hand cranking a car was a very common occurrence previously).
Glad to see copyfraud alive and well on Public Domain Day.
https://youtu.be/Xzk6acQO-KQ?si=zNIOA70iBS2_upWf
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> A rectifier is an electrical device that converts alternating current (AC), which periodically reverses direction, to direct current (DC), which flows in only one direction. The reverse operation (converting DC to AC) is performed by an inverter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectifier
As soon as electric starter became a thing, electric cars were dead. Their usage continued only with delivery vans for some time as gas engines were still unreliable and for delivery fleets, dispatch reliability was very important.
Properly dangerous in case people dont realize this. This wasnt people being squeamish.
>In the winter of 1908, a woman stalled her Cadillac in Belle Island, Michigan, and didn't have the strength to crank the car over. So she sat there. Another driver by the name of Byron Carter happened along and offered to start the stalled Cadillac. Carter was the founder of CarterCar, which was acquired by GM in 1909, largely due to the company's development work with friction transmissions. Carter was also a friend of Cadillac founder Henry Leland.
>When Carter turned the stalled Cadillac's crank, the engine reportedly backfired, the crank hit him in the face and broke his jaw. Tragically, gangrene set in, and, medicine being what it was at the turn of the last century, Carter died later that year.
Delivery vehicles (post/milkman) had to do the uphill people first as the batteries did not have enough power to get the car up the hill at the end of a day.
Also, I'm sure there were women who could turn the crank - and men who could not.