The long road of the electric car

Why the battery-powered car led the market, disappeared for ninety years, and came back

The assumption that the electric car is a recent invention, adopted reluctantly by an industry built on petrol, inverts the actual history. At the close of the nineteenth century the electric vehicle was not the challenger but the incumbent. It was quieter than its rivals, produced no fumes at the point of use, required no crank handle and no gear changes, and was consequently marketed to precisely the customers a new technology most wants: the wealthy, the urban and the impatient. In 1899 a Belgian engineer drove a torpedo-shaped electric machine past a hundred kilometres an hour, the first vehicle of any kind to do so, and for a few years the fastest cars in the world ran on batteries.

The competition at the time was genuinely three-cornered. Steam had the longest pedigree and the greatest power, but demanded a lengthy warming period and constant attention to water. The internal combustion engine was noisy, dirty and temperamental, and starting one required turning a crank that had a well-documented habit of breaking the operator's arm. Electricity had none of these defects. What it had instead was a limitation that no amount of refinement could disguise, and which has shaped every subsequent chapter of the story: the lead-acid battery stored a derisory quantity of energy for its weight, and recharging it took most of a night.

The contrast was visible on the street. Electric taxis worked the centres of London and New York around the turn of the century, and a fleet of them operated in Manhattan with a system for exchanging depleted batteries for charged ones, an arrangement periodically rediscovered and re-announced as an innovation ever since. Delivery firms, bakeries and department stores kept battery vans for decades longer than private owners kept battery cars, because a vehicle that returns to the same depot every evening and travels a predictable distance each day is precisely the vehicle a limited battery suits. The technology did not fail everywhere at once; it retreated to the applications that forgave its weakness.

Three developments settled the contest within a decade. The first was the discovery of substantial and cheap petroleum reserves, which made the fuel for combustion engines abundant at a moment when electricity remained an urban luxury. The second was mass production, which brought the price of a petrol car below that of an electric one and kept it falling. The third was decisive and, from the electric camp's point of view, cruel: the invention of the electric starter motor in 1912 removed the crank, and with it the principal reason a driver might prefer a battery. Within roughly fifteen years the electric passenger car had effectively vanished from the market it once led.

It did not return for most of a century, and the reasons for its eventual reappearance had little to do with any breakthrough in motors, which had been perfectly adequate all along. What changed was storage. The lithium-ion cell, commercialised for consumer electronics at the beginning of the 1990s, stored several times the energy of lead-acid for the same mass, and its cost per unit of capacity then fell for three decades with a persistence that few forecasters anticipated. A technology developed to make camcorders lighter turned out to be the missing component of a vehicle abandoned in the 1920s.

The improvement was also cumulative in a way that combustion could not match. An engine that has been refined for a century yields a few per cent at a time to further effort, whereas a cell manufactured by the million in a factory built for telephones benefits from every advance made for any of its other customers. Batteries got better because a great many industries wanted them to, and the car industry was for a long time the least of them.

Regulation supplied the second impetus. Californian rules obliging manufacturers to offer vehicles producing no exhaust generated a handful of experimental models in the 1990s, most of which were withdrawn and destroyed once the requirement was relaxed, to considerable public annoyance. The episode is instructive nonetheless: it demonstrated that the engineering was no longer the obstacle. When a small California company put a battery-powered sports car into production in 2008, the achievement was not that the thing worked but that it was desirable, and the established manufacturers who had insisted the market did not exist were obliged to revise their opinion in public.

What has not changed is the shape of the problem. A modern electric car still carries a heavy chemical store that takes longer to refill than a tank of liquid fuel, still depends on infrastructure that has to be built before demand appears rather than after, and still displaces its emissions to wherever its electricity is generated. The century-old objections have been reduced rather than eliminated. Yet the historical record does suggest one useful caution against confident prediction. The electric car did not lose its first contest because it was the inferior technology. It lost because a rival became cheaper to fuel and easier to start at exactly the moment the decision was being made, and the industry that resulted then spent ninety years assuming the question had been settled on merit.