We were doomed. It was all over the print media, from the Wall Street Journal to Rolling Stone: gasoline was headed to four dollars a gallon and then up, up and away from there—perhaps to ten dollars a pop. Even as we spoke, the Chinese were stalking Africa, sealing up our supplies. The West would be frozen, forever in a downward spiral, living standards shrinking at accelerated pace. The American Century was over.
And then it appeared, descended from heaven and opening on a half shell. Whoosh, the mists part and there she stands, the solution: the electric car. The best part of it, she’s essentially free to operate: due to the nature of the electric grid, her night time power up time would have zero effect on overall electrical demand. We would drive for free.
Example one was the Chevy Volt, still an unreleased thing but now firmly in the pipeline. Its engineers claim that she gets in excess of 200 miles per gallon. We are saved! We may now confidently fart in the direction of Mecca.
But wait, the fine print. The Volt doesn’t actually get 200 miles a gallon. In fact, its MPG is quite average for a four banger. What gives? You see, it doesn’t use any gas for the first 40 miles. After that, she turns into a pig. First, she’s an electric car towing a gas engine and then she turns into a gas car towing an electric engine. Neat. But something less than the Jetson approach many of us hoped for.
Leave it to the Japanese, specifically Honda. They have a car that uses no gas at all. That means that its MPG is infinity, right? Sort of. After sixty miles her MPG drops to whatever a tow truck gets. Unlike the Volt, she isn’t towing a needless gasoline engine. She just gets pooped and stops working. Oh, and she needs between four and eight hours beauty rest between excursions. Better, but not exactly salvation.
There’s also the Telsa and a few other cars on the drawing board which will start trickling in any day now. Only the Volt and the Honda are likely to be at a reasonable price. The rest are in that Prius territory. An economy car which is neither economical to buy or operate isn’t exactly an economy car. All in all it seems the electric car is on the same development path that the cell phone was: at first, for drug dealers only and then eventually ubiquitous. Or something like that.
All of this would be reassuring, except that this is the electric car’s second act. It’s actually a rather old concept. The first electric cars started rolling off assembly lines one hundred years ago. But the circumstances were a little different.
The entirety of the automobile industry is a second act writ large. When it started out, cars were very similar to what computers used to be. Imagine buying your car from a little shop on the corner where it was also assembled. The parts, the engines and gears and other components, were widely made available to hobbyists and small retailers. In 1900 there were over 2000 automobile manufacturers.
Eventually the industry consolidated. It had considerable help from the onset. Most of these little shops that were assembling motorcars had started in the business of making something else--specifically bicycles. At the turn of the century there existed something called the Bicycle Trust, which was an attempt to bring together the entirety of the bicycle industry. This trust systematically acquired all of the parts manufacturers, set production standards, settled on a final configuration for all models—and succumbed, gagging on red ink.
As it turns out, the bicycle wasn’t exactly the mass transportation revolution that everyone had predicted. The idea, a personal transportation device, was a good one, but the product, the bicycle, wasn’t actually the answer. Before it went bust, the Bicycle Trust had spread the idea that every component made should be interchangeable and compatible with every other component manufactured industry wide. This was an absolutely revolutionary concept. And it was from this baseline that the automotive industry emerged. As for the bicycle industry, composed mostly of little assembly shops, it went in three directions: motorcars, mass transit and air craft.
By the time a functional, widely available motorcar was finally introduced, street cars, busses and steam powered construction equipment had been common for decades. All of these had emerged from the wreckage of the Bicycle Trust.
Not all of these plants were small. The median capitalization of auto makers in 1900 was one million dollars, which makes them sizable businesses. The Bicycle Trust had geared up for a wave of mass production which was never needed. Many of the auto manufacturers had purchased their plants second hand from bicycle makers who had gone bust. The automobile industry’s initial infrastructure was largely picked up on the cheap.
The first big motorcar maker was Pope Manufacturing, which was sort of the Dell Computers of its day. It simply assembled cars in common configurations and then offered them for sale to retail stores. It was sort of a way of bypassing the small assembly shops. These cars were sold in more upscale stores. The selling point here was that, unlike the cars made in little assemblies, the cars manufactured by Pope were completely standardized and made by a firm that would stand behind its product.
Orphan cars were a major problem in the early days of the automotive industry. Your little street corner shop was very willing to switch operating systems—from dos, to windows, to apple, to unix, to linux—on whim and then not support their previous products. Moreover, these products, mostly what were called cycle cars, were hand crafted and rather idiosyncratic. They were guess-worked together and fell apart rather easily. Pope’s products were a step up. They at least failed all in the same way.
Pope itself was all that was left of the Bicycle Trust. It was literally all of the Trust’s assets which could not be sold. Born in bankruptcy court, it went straight to issuing stocks and bonds the day it emerged. Besides autos, it also manufactured bicycles.
The firm no longer owned any of the parts manufacturers, but it did control their standards. Pope’s real innovation was coming up with brands for cars at specific price points. The actual types of cars, coupe, sedan and truck, had been developed by the horse and buggy industry. Pope’s brand for the masses was called ‘Columbia’, which is what the firm is sometimes known by. Columbias were available in hardware stores and department retailers nationwide.
Although they had settled on the idea of branding cars at specific price points, they had not settled on a universal drive system. All Pope’s came in three configurations: kerosene driven, steam powered and electric. In each case, the drive system, or engine, was located under where people sat in the car. The kerosene driven version, with its internal combustion engine, or explosion engine, faced a lot of resistance to consumer adoption since people didn’t want to sit above a contraption that was in the business of perpetually exploding. Its steam driven system, which was based on the proven technology that drove most vehicles of the time, required an hour to bring into operation and about two hours of maintenance time between starts. The electric system functioned wonderfully, but only over short distances. And there were plug in cars, early on.
At first it seemed electric was the way to go. So much so that Pope bet the farm, sending a lot of its capital and all of its car manufacturing expertise to a newly formed Electric Car Trust. This trust wound up creating an electric stage coach. The idea was that they would dominate the train station to home livery business and then branch outward. This turned out to be poorly thought through: even if they had 100% of the taxi business, it would have never funded them. They spent all of their money coming up with the electric stage coach and setting themselves up in all major markets. By the time they were ready to operate the livery business, they were out of funds. Although there were some unforeseen problems with the car itself, (Thomas Edison’s condemnation didn’t help the stage coach’s reputation) the trust’s basic problem is that they had far underestimated their need for capitalization.
That’s pretty much the whole story, too. Several books have been written claiming that there was some sort of conspiracy against the electric car. No one at the time that Pope’s Electric Vehicle Company went bust thought there was a secret boogeyman behind it. Although Pope Manufacturing and the Electric Car Trust were convinced that electricity was the way to go, the general public was not. In response to public demand, chemical corporations had introduced two new, but identical, formulations of kerosene specifically for cars called petroleum and gasoline. Knight, Pratt & Whitney, Lycoming and others began stepped up manufacturing of gas powered engines. By the time the Electric Car Trust rolled their first unit, the internal combustion engine had become the industry standard. Electric and steam powered cars were orphaned, vanishing from the roads within the span of a few years.
Pope’s electric car was never really intended for sale to the general public. It was a free range street car, a small bus, meant to supplement the mass transit system. Gasoline powered cars not only had better range, better durability and better economy to operate, they were also cheaper to construct. Gas engines are drop forge affairs, with minimal complications. Electric engines of the time were rather hand crafted and complex.
Today, of course, things have changed. All car engines already are electric, gasoline, computer controlled hybrids. Our problem is that we have come to demand so many things other than performance from these engines. As for performance, the potential for each may have topped out. Once you stray to more than 40 MPG in a gas engine, the car becomes an afterthought. It’s a cart, incapable of lugging golf bags and groceries and taking five kids to the soccer game. Ditto the electric car once you ask it to go more than 40 miles or so on a charge. Now it’s a battery container, a roving acid ball, built more for the service of itself than it is any function a car might provide.
If the electric car was such a hot idea, it would have improved by more than 20 miles on a charge in 100 years. Electric Vehicle’s stage coach got 40 miles off a charge. The Volt just duplicates this. The Honda and the Tesla hardly seem 100 years better. One might argue that the electric car’s evolution has been retarded by economic factors, however electric cars did not go out of production with the demise of Pope. There have been a string of electric car manufacturers since then, the most successful of which, Citicar, went out of business in the 1980s. That said, there was a time when fax machines and radio phones were side-stream items. Now that the electric car is mainstream, we can expect it to follow the pattern of other innovations.
Coda:
What has really hamstrung the electric car is the idea of carrying a battery. In a perfect world, it would draw its electric from the road or from the air itself. This very science fiction sounding concept is not only viable, but it was tested early on. What put the kibosh on it was Thomas Edison’s demand that all electricity be transported by wire, so that he could charge ala carte for it. In the end, it all boiled down to one man’s greed.
And there’s no going back. Setting up a system of electric aerials either in or around the roadways would effectively spell the end of all broadcast communications. You can either have television, radio and cell phones or air electric. You can’t have both. Sometimes I wonder if we have made the right choice. In the mean time, the electric car travels via battery or not at all.
Coda II:
Our pals in the electric car industry have started to hem and haw on the issue of price. Or is it the issue of charger range? Whatever the issue is, electric car advocates have been all over the television news and infotainment shows boostering the idea of paying for car transportation in the same way that you pay for cell phone minutes. By the time they are through explaining whatever it is they are selling, whatever it is they are selling has become obscured.
Here’s the deal: You sign up for their service on a miles per day plan. In return, they give you access to a fully charged car that you may drive to and from work, but which magically disappears when you are not using it. The service spends its off hours charging cars and shuffling them around. I admire their PR might, but what they are selling is patently goofy. Either an electric car acts like a car or I don’t need it. Neither does anyone else.
The fear they are playing on is that the infrastructure for electric cars is going to be spotty for some time. This is flying in the face of historical patterns. The moment the electric car gains any sort of ground, plugs will start to appear in parking lots and along the roadside. If anything, certain things may start to disappear, such as gas stations and quick lube shops. But nothing is going to really happen until the electrocar comes down in price.
Next: The scammers have been staying up late coming up with more ways to fool the public, so it’s time for Ajax Telegraph to do a little of his own burning of the night oil with a new expose. Details will be announced soon!
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