Woman with rectifier and electric car (1912)

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)

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.

Replace gas/elecric with digital/analog. Is something I contemplated having studied neuroscience.

I wonder if anyone at the time had an inkling of the long-term downsides of gasoline powered engines?

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

   ...it was dangerous and dirty. Especially women.

Also, I'm sure there were women who could turn the crank - and men who could not.

I don't predict EVs will completely takeover though, as there is major distrust now of most governments and the one world order that seems to be attempting to form, and the highly dense energy of easily transportation gasoline is an obvious way to not be dependant on an easily controlled-captured power grid.

I dunno, actually, it is hard to say because we tend to be a little pessimistic nowadays, I don’t think we overlook much, it is just that there’s an all encompassing feeling that every choice has negative outcomes and we have to pick one. Maybe that’s the thing we’re overlooking, cynicism disguised as skepticism resulting in total paralysis.

I'm pessimistic, but I doubt the human race can bring up the sacrifices needed to save itself from slow (or fast) annihilation.

We have the tech, the knowledge, the urgency and the funds to change. I'm convinced all that's holding us back from actually fixing stuff is social.