Worked for 52 Years, Still Running: 1912 C-T 4WD Electric Truck | Hacker News Reader

Worked for 52 Years, Still Running: 1912 C-T 4WD Electric Truck

bringatrailer.com

291 pointsprostoalex112 comments

Jay Leno (tv host and car enthusiast) has a few very old electric cars in his collection. In one video (link at the end) he talks about how he and his wife drove one of the electric cars down to a fancy hotel.

They expected to be a surprising and exotic sight, but one of the bellhops asked them if they knew Mrs X, who had been driving to the hotel for 5 or six decades until 2001 in her similar electric car.

https://youtu.be/OhnjMdzGusc?t=5m35s

I hope Jay is able to acquire one of these. He and his crew do a wonderful job preserving our automotive legacy.

That is one sweet vehicle. I'm working at a college where students are restoring a Detroit Electric from 1918. The car is in excellent shape, electrically, mechanically and visually. The lead acid batteries were removed by the previous owner.

The students are now fitting in Li-Ion batteries. There will be no power electronics, just a mechanical switch that can put coils of the 4 pole DC series wound motor either in parallel (high torque) or in series (high speed). The motor has 4.5HP and the car has a top speed of 35km/h.

No electronics is hard. By the time my temptations are done, the inside would be full of lcds.

> I'm working at a college where students are restoring a Detroit Electric from 1918. The car is in excellent shape, electrically, mechanically and visually

Having worked with ME students in the past I can say with confidence you won't be using those adjectives to describe the project when they're done with that.

Rookie mistakes aside, what you do for grades has little overlap with what you do to get a good result. Every college engineering project has this problem. The things you'd do to deliver the best result possible with the resources you have are not the same things you'd do if you're optimizing for grades. You do dumb things run a simulation to prove you can and check the box when in reality you should just over-build it and spend the time on part of the project that's gonna require a few revisions to get right.

Wait, what? You do things differently when the goal of the exercise is learning instead of production?

Of course you do. Why on earth would you think that's a bad thing?

Why would putting the batteries in parallel offer more torque?

http://www.me.umn.edu/courses/me2011/arduino/technotes/dcmot...

My guess is that this is putting the coils in parallel, not the batteries.

According to that link, the applied voltage determines the speed and the applied current determines the torque. I don't know the exact configuration of the windings in these motors, but having the coils in series should be putting a higher voltage on the motor (higher resistance), and having the coils in parallel should have more current (lower resistance).

Pretty neat way to get a "2 speed" transmission. Of course, it's not going to be as good as the current generation of BLDC motors (variable speed is tricky with bang-bang control...), but for the time it's a pretty clever solution.

> Pretty neat way to get a "2 speed" transmission.

It's almost identical to how the two speed "transmission" works on 12 volt Power Wheels toy ride-on vehicles.

In those, there are two motors connected to the rear wheels; one for each wheel. Using a couple of switches on the "shifter", the motors can be connected to the battery in series (high speed) or parallel (low speed).

Also interesting is that by using two separate motors in that manner, you gain a form of "electromechanical" differential (not that it matters much, as the plastic wheels have insane amount of slippage on most surfaces).

The Power Wheels don't put the motors in parallel or series, it switches the two 6V batteries between parallel or series. The motors are always in parallel.

See the patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US4639646A/en?assignee=%22...

This seems potentially backwards to me. If we apply a voltage source across the terminals, parallel coils between the terminals would result in higher voltage across each coil than would series coils. With series coils, the total voltage applied would be divided between the coils.

Could someone clarify?

I'm looking at it as a total system. You've got, say, a 12V battery with some internal series resistance. And, say, the two coils are 6 ohm each. Let's say the internal resistance of the battery is 1 ohm, arbitrarily.

If the two coils are in series, you'll have a total coil resistance of 12 ohms (13 ohms incl internal resistance), and will get 0.923A (12V/13ohm) through the motor, with a terminal voltage of 11.07V (12V x 12ohm/13ohm).

If the two coils are in parallel, you'll have a resistance of 3 ohms, and a current of 3A through the motor (12V/4ohm), and a terminal voltage of 9V (12V x 3ohm/4ohm). Lots more current, but lower terminal voltage.

Edit: formatting

Great explanation, as far as I recall that is exactly how it works.

Thanks!

At the beginning of the 20th century something around 40% American cars was electric, same with 20% of the Berlin taxis.

There's a wonderful book "The Shock of the Old" about the meandering ways innovation takes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shock_of_the_Old

So much for the "big oil killed the electric car" conspiracies. The electric cars were always a contender, and the companies producing them would have loved to kill petrol cars. They were simply unable to compete with the high energy density of dead dinosaurs gushing out of the ground to be burned carefreely.

My good friend is a material scientist for Exxon. He is employed to find "the next oil". As he says, its all about "joules of energy per $1 landed cost" everything else is just noise.

Currently, $1 (retail price) of gasoline delivers more joules of energy than any of the competition. The rise of fracking has made nat gas a contender, but gasoline is still dominates.

Most comparisons to electric vehicles are actually a comparison of a car that runs on gas vs a car that runs on coal, guess which one wins?

The vast majority (70%) of electricity in the US does not come from coal, and coal is even less used in states where electric cars are popular/encouraged. Over 99% of electricity generated in my state (NY) does not come from coal.

Sources: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electrici...

https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=NY#tabs-4

Also, power plants are much more efficient in burning whatever fossil fuel you want, compared to internal combustion engines.

Not to mention that when you use gas in a car, a lot of it is wasted. When you use the grid to power electric means of transportation, like trains, that energy is evenly distributed as needed, and plants will increase or reduce production in accordance to estimated demand.

Another important consideration is pollution. If you burn a polluting fuel directly in the car, the pollution is released where the car is, which is generally where a lot of people are.

You can reduce the emissions by adding technology to process the combustion products to clean them up before emitting them, but you are limited by the fact that your cleanup technology has to be small enough and light weight enough to include with the car.

If you burn that same fuel remotely to make electricity, and use that electricity to power the car, now the pollution is being emitted at a fixed location.

We can pick that location to minimize the harm from the pollution that is emitted, and we can use far more effective cleanup technology at a fixed plant than we can on a vehicle.

This has always struck me as the most compelling argument for electric vehicles, and I've always been disappointed by people who can't see it.

Perhaps because the pollution emitted by gas-powered vehicles is now essentially nil

At the expense of many layers of defensive mechanisms which a non-trivial number of people illegally modify, and I'm curious how close to "nil" it really is.

My understanding is that, at least in the context of local polution emissions (mostly smog related?) is that the difference between emissions between electric and gas cars is dwarfed by the pollution effects of rubber and concrete particulate matter created by driving.

I'm not entirely sure how accurate my knowledge is though, it's based on a few sort of tangential comments that connected some other data points I know, and not from any one source I can cite.

Also, the impression I got was this ignores things like leaking oil, which isn't measured by my state's emissions test. So I'm not trying to make claims about overall pollution effects between gas and electric.

Also as the energy mix in the grid gets greener, everything on the grid takes free advantage of the increased efficiency. If your state adds a giant solar array and spins down a coal plant, you don't have to do anything to get that overall cleaner energy into an electric car.

> Most comparisons to electric vehicles are actually a comparison of a car that runs on gas vs a car that runs on coal, guess which one wins?

At least for Europe, this is not true. Electricity source varies by country, but it's in general a mix of 30%-50% nuclear, the rest is thermal or renewable. For thermal power-plants, the large majority are natural gas. Renewable percentage varies wildly between countries, but breaching the 50% barrier on a given year is no longer newsworthy.

Isn't that gas $1 because it's heavily subsidized, though?

> Most comparisons to electric vehicles are actually a comparison of a car that runs on gas vs a car that runs on coal, guess which one wins?

Very true, but it depends on your energy provider to these actual numbers. For instance, if I were to buy an electric today and plug it in; 48% of it would be powered by coal, 12% wind, 1% hydro and solar, 7% nuclear, and 32% natural gas and oil (no idea on how much is NG vs oil). Efficiency in production of renewable resources and social pressure would bring this number down.

Or, if money were no object, an array of solar panels (and that price is dropping every year) could easily power my garage and all the things inside it. No coal, no emissions.

This sounds like BS on several levels.

#1 Electricity delivers far more energy per dollar, especially off-peak. Local EV owners are complaining on social media that they're averaging five cents per mile in the below zero temps we've been having. Using offpeak energy and good weather, costs can drop below one cent a mile. At $3/gallon and 25 mpg, that would be 12 cents a mile in a typical gas vehicle.

#2 Coal is dying. Dropping natural gas and solar prices are killing it. Electric autos get cleaner as the grid does.

#3 Even if you got lots of energy per unit of gasoline, simply refining one gallon of gasoline uses enough power an electric car can travel >15 miles on the refining energy alone.

Well, depends on the country. In mine, it's Hydro, in others it might be Nuclear, but yes, most developed countries have a shocking amount of coal plants.

The missing second part of that exposition:

The $1 gasoline is poured into a horrendously complex, noisy, brittle, contrived piece of technological megadebt.

Electricity goes to one motor per wheel it needs to drive. In 1912 and in 2018.

So why didn't the clean and efficient design dominate then?

Because the batteries sucked. They take too long to recharge, don't hold enough charge, are heavy, are bulky, and cost too much.

As ugly as a gas engine is it does offer quick refueling, long range, and low cost. It's just more practical, especially with turn of the century technology.

>. It's just more practical, especially with turn of the century technology.

Both 19th/20th and 20th/21st according to the sales numbers

Yep. Fast charging is still an unsolved problem for electric cars (15 minutes for a 85 miles is not fast enough IMHO) although some electric scooters have swappable battery packs which do fit the bill.

I do fully expect we will have these problems licked before the next turn of the century.

Although Tesla abandoned the idea because of lack of interest (which I do find strange), a swapping station solves this problem. A depleted battery can be swapped for a fresh one in less time than a gasoline fillup requires.

Tesla uses the battery as a structural part of the chassis. A swappable battery simply would not be possible.

Not with the current design, but it's not hard to imagine a design that makes it possible.

Piston engines are quite simple and can be extremely reliable.

There is typically a trade-off between maintenance and replacement. Piston engines require on-going maintenance, but can last a really long time. Electric motors require almost no maintenance but need to be rebuilt/replaced more often.

Your average gasoline engine is kaput after 5,000 hours. Same deal with standard automatic transmissions.

Electric motors, power electronics, and simple reduction gears can last 5-10 times longer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

http://documentaryheaven.com/who-killed-the-electric-car/

I recommend the follow up film as well, Revenge of the Electric Car. (It follows the launches of the Chevy Volt and Nissan Leaf, as well as the first production run of the Tesla Roadster.)

Somebody once pointed to me that the reason internal combustion engines vehicle require so little gas is because half of the energy in the combustion comes from the air around it, and therefore does not need to transport it.

One of the few times I felt "mind blown".

Coal? Please get out of here.

70k of the EV miles I've put on have been with 93.3% non-fossil fuel based sources[1]. If you're in the PNW EVs are a clear win both from fuel sources and the fact that it costs me $6/300mi at $0.07/kWh.

[1] https://www.cowlitzpud.org/fuel-mix

I think they meant oil.

Ah yeah, this was meant as a reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16214124

Looks like it went to the wrong thread when HN hiccuped.

Interesting also by the early 1900s a company called "Electric Vehicle company" was running up to 1,000 electric taxicabs on the streets of New York City.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_New_York_City#Late...

Also in early 1900s, a Baker Electric was part of the first White House fleet of cars. President William Howard Taft changed things up at the White House, converting the stables there to a garage and purchasing a four-car fleet on a $12,000 budget (equivalent to $326,844 in 2017).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_state_car_(United...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_Motor_Vehicle#Special_Ba...

Personally I'm wondering whether or not the steam engine will ever make a comeback. There have been some attempts (e.g. a company called Enginion with their SteamCell) that didn't get sufficient funding despite promising results.

Modern steam engines do not require lubricants, are low emission and can use renewable energy sources.

If you include 'steam turbines' into the steam engine category then steam has never left. And even if you don't there are some interesting tricks that steam can do that only electrical comes close (such as all the torque at 0 RPM) which makes steam uniquely suitable for some purposes (very heavy offshore cranes for instance, deck catapults on flight decks for another).

Steam catapults on flight decks have been replaced with linear electric motors for new ships.

http://www.ga.com/emals

Except they don’t work yet (in the US at least):

https://www.google.com/search?q=ford+catapult+aircraft+carri...

That's very cool. Thank you for that bit of info, I did not know about it, but it makes good sense, the torque curves are similar and electric is probably less of a hassle to maintain.

They are actually quite costly and unreliable, or at least they used to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_Aircraft_Launc...

Another thing is that apparently the electric one allows for different launch velocities. Thus they can tailor it more to what they are launching.

A vehicle size condenser for a modest power output becomes a huge power draw in hotter outdoor temperatures (https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/197000... discusses it).

You can get around that some by venting and filling water but that also becomes a system limit.

Meanwhile the downside to a huge ICE is fuel consumption.

True, but they require a source of heat. And the question is what to burn or what to use for heating, and in order to be a true steam engine, it should not be electrical or hydrocarbons ( otherwise you don't need an extra engine on top - just burn/use that already).

So what's left is carbon in different presentations : wood, or coal, etc.

Nuclear is steam.

They use steam turbines, they work differently than steam machines.

This comment made me think of the movie Steam Boy.

Awesome, I like it a lot. One note about motor power: 85V * 10A = 850W (which is 1.15 HP) so that seller gives a wrong information!

Thanks for the article

This part makes it even more confusing:

In the battery compartment, nine trays were used to hold a 500 pound, five-foot-long lead-acid battery pack that produced 10 volts.

I guess it is 10 volts per cell, not for the entire pack? With 9 cells in series that would give 90 V which sounds close enough.

Still confused. :)

The missing word is "each", I believe. 9 packs, 10V per pack, each pack (consisting of 5 batteries) weighing 500lb.

Yeah, I was also confused by 2 hours charge. It's very uncommon for lead-acid batteries...

It may actually be correct (16 HP). Read on in the comments. 10A could be the wrong figure.

Those curious about early electric vehicles may find this old book, free courtesy of archive.org, very interesting:

https://archive.org/details/audelsnewelectri008004mbp

Chapter 162(!) at the end is short but entirely about electric trucks and tractors. The rest of the book is mostly electric locomotives and there is also a short section near the end on electric elevators.

There's Mr Rogers episode about a car with similar tech in 1981, kinda neat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyKJ-iQ7MPM

"laden" or "loaded", please, but NOT "laded"!!

This is really the most exciting thing about electric-motor vehicles to me. With such fewer moving parts there's less to break down and go wrong.

Having a vehicle that's more than likely able to last 25+ years without any real maintenance at all* is extremely enticing. I wonder how this will affect future electric car values. And I wonder if we can curb our consumerism mentalities to actually let something like this happen.

Unfortunately, with the tech-minded companies producing these vehicles; I'm afraid of planned obsolescence.

> With such fewer moving parts there's less to break down and go wrong.

People don't really appreciate that enough. It's mostly solid state electronics. The only major degrading part is the battery. Its currently not too cheap to replace, but it is highly recyclable. Fix the battery and the car is basically new. The drivetrain will last for a long while.

I'm not so sure about this; part of my father's business involves rebuilding electric motors and I was surprised by the rebuild intervals of some of them.

I'm sure they will be engineered to a certain life expectancy, but I'm interested to see how long they will end up lasting in modern automotive applications.

What kind of electric motors? Brushed DC by chance?

I don't know much about electric motors, but I think these are typically 230 or 460V AC, three-phase motors in the 10-30hp range.

They operate in extreme conditions though, so that's certainly a factor.

The interior will still degrade from normal wear and tear. Cracked plastic, ripped upholstery, broken trim, etc. And if any part of the vehicle is made of steel it's eventually going to rust unless the operator is really diligent about preventative maintenance.

30-year-old Corollas still limp around just fine. They may not be pretty, but definitely functional.

Sure they run. But the parent post stated that in electric cars only the batteries degrade. In reality a lot of other parts will also degrade.

Some people will replace their cars when they become cosmetically unsatisfactory - and, if they care about this that strongly, they will take better care, which will improve this issue considerably. In the end, its a combination of how good the materials and construction were originally, plus the owners care. No impact from the drivetrain here.

Then there are the little things breaking everywhere. A light here (leds improve that), windshield wipers, maybe a broken cupholder. These are also not impacted by the drivetrain.

In general though, a car breaking down frequently, or one that constantly gives the owner trouble when they are trying to go somewhere (failing to start properly, etc) is much more problematic. They will end up in the dump. This is where I was aiming my comment at.

Is this the same one listed on craigslist?

https://losangeles.craigslist.org/lac/cto/d/1912-t-electric-...

Yes, it links to that listing in the first paragraph of the article.

The ultimate http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html, getting a cragslist post to the top of HN.

The Craigslist link in the article has way more details and is more interesting to read than the article itself.

Also, people forget that the first cars were electric. Battery tech just wasn't there 100+ years ago and the combustion engine won out...

https://losangeles.craigslist.org/lac/cto/d/1912-t-electric-...

> Also, people forget that the first cars were electric.

There were early (earlier than internal combustion) electric cars, but external combustion (steam) cars were even earlier (both prototype and practical vehicles.)

Carried double the recommended capacity for 10 tons for 8 mph fully loaded all day without recharge with the equivalent of 12 of today's batteries Probably from train station delivering the paper rolls to the printing presses all day back and forth.

Sounds impressive, the covered wagon cab when it came out is interesting too.

I think the math is a bit wrong in the article.

   > 85-volt, 10-amp General Electric motor
   > They each produced 16 HP when new

85V 10A -> 850W of power provided to each motor

16HP is just under 12000W, so the motors had an efficiency of 1404% ?

This could be "peak pull away power" vs "continuous running power".

Motors are normally rated in continuous power, but I bet marketing materials would mention the peak power, since that's most relevant to the use case of getting up to speed.

The post says 85volts 10amps, that's 850watts. Which is around 1.2 horse power. With 4 of these it made at best 5hp. I'm not sure why the post says each motor made 16hp. Something is not right

During that time half the cars on the road were electric. It is truly sad to see how we have regressed. I wonder what will happen first? Extinction of the human race because of global warming? Or half the cars being electric? ...

We went towards ICE vehicles because the power to weight ratio was so much better with gasoline.

And the range. At the time, long-distance travel was becoming possible for the average vehicle owner. And they didn't want to stop for half a day every hundred miles. Just like today.

Tangentally, I came across this film from Market Street in 1906. There's lots of different modes of transportation in use - horse-drawn carts, electric cars, gasoline cars, cable cars, electric trolleys, and pedestrians (who were amazingly casual about dodging between everything else that was moving - the accidental death toll was probably huge)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEvB_ZIWtAg

>who were amazingly casual about dodging between everything else that was moving - the accidental death toll was probably huge

Probably less than you'd think.

Traffic now likes to forget that while the legal rules offer redundancy 99% of the time (if only one party follows the rules the other party should be able to take action to avoid a conflict if it is following the rules that apply to it) the legal rules do not supersede physics.

I walk to work every day. Morons on foot cut off morons on bikes who cut off morons in cars who cut off heavy trucks.

You only need to see a horse turned into taco meat once or twice to learn why you shouldn't rely on other traffic's ability to pick up the slack for your dumb decisions. People learn what to do and what not to pretty quickly when the stakes are higher than someone slamming on their brakes and honking at you.

...and it took most of a century to get better batteries! What was the delay I wonder?

Material Science really.

Honestly, if all car today and in the last 70 years had huge lead batteries, I don't think it would be a good thing. Battery recycling is a fair problem for today's electric cars and people at the time used to throw away anywhere what they didn't need any more, including their car batteries.

  Residents of southeast L.A. County rejoiced this year at
  news that a battery recycling plant that had long emitted
  lead, arsenic and other dangerous pollutants would be
  closed.

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-exide-cleanup-story...

When I worked as a stock boy at K-Mart in the 1990s I remember a whole corner of the loading dock was kept stacked with used and returned batteries, many of them leaking all over the place. I was just a kid and didn't know much, but I knew enough to not want to go anywhere near them. Thankfully only those working at the return counter and on the loading dock handled the batteries.

Not sure what you mean exactly, but lead acid battery recycling is something like 95% effective in terms of what is recovered, and lead can be easily recycled multiple times. Lithium being more expensive is also well known for being able to be recycled.

What I meant was that back in the old days, people didn't bother as much to recycle things, so lead batteries ended up thrown away in the nature. Of course today we recycle a lot more, so it would be less of a problem.

In what geography, any evidence? Those who lived through the wars and depression(s), and baby-boomers, are notorious for their frugality and reuse.

Where I live (european country) people used to throw away things in a big dump and then it would be burned or something, but now you have to separate things. I don't have any evidence of it though. Maybe they were recycling it themselves for all this time!

probably better than literally shooting the lead out of the exhaust ... Did we forget about leaded gasoline?

They do that today too. My dad owns a farm- the stuff we fished out of roadside ditch- including lead batterys - you would vomit knowing about the details.

I always found it also strange that in the UK, and in my small town in Scotland (and pretty much all towns around here) had electric trams installed. They were all ripped out.

Now Edinburgh has them and spent god knows how many billions on it.

Trams in Milan (such as the orange ones that you can see in San Francisco, built between 1928 and 1932) have been electric since 1901. Until then they were using steam engines outside the city, where they were basically a light railway, and animals inside.

Same in Prague, except that they used to be horse-carried before they went electric.

UK: Also milk floats

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float

Very characteristic motor sound early in the morning.

Fortunately the Edinburgh trams were "only" £776 million... :-|

I seriously believe that is pure corruption. HighSpeed2 should cost a fraction of the price being quoted as well. It shouldn't take a country decades to pay back the cost of laying down rails in such a small country as ours. I estimate 10% goes to the project, 90% goes into peoples pockets without doing a days work.

Presumably in the future, with blockchain-style transactions, we'll be able to see where exactly the money went in such situations.

What makes you think contractors on public works won't use tumblers?

They wouldn't just need tumblers, they'd also need secret wallets. Public funds pay in to contractor wallet, ..., contractor wallet pays tumbler ... that should be enough to demonstrate corruption?

They trams where seen as old fashioned and local government decided that the new bus technology was better.

And as you say towns are now putting trams back in - though places like Blackpool did keep theirs.

Kansas City has seen a resurrection of their streetcar. And people love it. It's been operational for a year and a half and has only 16 stops at this point, but has already logged 3 million riders [1].

There's a major push to expand it throughout downtown/suburbs. It's definitely a cool factor still at this point, but plenty of people who wouldn't ride the bus are going out of their way to ride that.

As a local, I'm excited to see it expand. They've made public transportation sexy, efficient (100% electric), and convenient in a city where the average household has two cars and everyone drives themselves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC_Streetcar

The Virginia/DC corridor used to be served by an electric passenger rail service (the Washington & Old Dominion) but it was shut down 60s when everybody switched to cars. We are now spending billions basically rebuilding half of it as the Silver Line.

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