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I'm sorry but I reject the premise of this article completely, we're having trouble displacing ICE with electric now the idea that lead acid powered vehicles could have displaced ICE in 1960s is absurd.

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The first electric cars date from the 1890s. The reason we're having trouble* now is because ICE cars are so entrenched in society, much more than 60 years ago. Back then it would have been easier than today.

*I take the word "trouble" to mean "progress is slower than some people would like." To that I say, be patient. Societal-scale change takes time.

Is it that ICE cars are entrenched in society or is it that electric cars are still inferior in some pretty obvious ways?

We've built our infrastructure around ICE vehicles. Our entire built environment might have looked much different if we had optimized for a different technology.

Did we?

I swear I see more power lines obstructing my view of the sky than gas stations.

Having thought this before I got my first EV - every fear and assumption I had turned out to be based on trying to think about my EV as an ICE. Everything I need to do in life is honestly easier with the EV.

I have driven an EV for the last 6 years. I find it to be superior to an ICE in almost every way. Range was, occasionally, a minor issue. I've recently bought a new (to me) EV with a larger battery. Range is no longer an issue. So yeah, for the vast majority of use cases, it has more to do with culture than practicality at this point.

It would have been easier then I think. Far less people had cars, Many people remembered life without cars then, and at least my city had a far better transit system in the early 60s than today.

In the 50s my grandfather was living in the country without owning a car, working in town before he attempted farming. He knew someone with a car, and if they were free they gave him a ride home, if not he walked 7 miles home. He would know if they were free by if they showed up at the end of the day or not.

So obviously, a car was a huge improvement in quality of life for him. But also, pretty much any car would do. 50 mile range? Fine. Slow charging? Fine. He had been just walking.

Lead-acid power is what the EV1 came out with, so something similar to that could have existed in the 1960s. Cheaper vehicles would have been closer to golf carts or electric bikes, but it would have been possible.

Because EVs didn't have the range of gasoline vehicles, EV concepts in the old days usually included something like overhead catenary power lines, or in-road induction or other "3rd rail" type charging on freeways, in order to sustain longer trips.

Let's try to keep in-mind that 1960s cars were horrendously unreliable, not starting when you turned the key because they were too hot or too cold, requiring obscene amounts of maintenance, etc., so a trade-off of range in exchange for an immensely reliable vehicle is something many people would have been willing to make, too.

The EV1 switched battery chemistries almost immediately, because the lead-acid version was terrible. GM only used lead acid as a stop gap and knew the result was unacceptable. What made the EV1 appealing was its spaceship-like high tech interior and computer controls, followed shortly by its NiMH battery pack. I strongly disagree with the claim that something like the EV1 could have existed in the 1960's.

In the 1960s not everywhere had completed the shift from automobiles as a nice-to-have to a complete necessity. Perhaps we would have had more investment in public transit and better designed places.

The proponents at the time weren't just promoting lead BEVs, but also things that never stopped being electric or steam they just stopped being used/built in American cities like trolleys/light rail/tram lines because ICE offered more "freedom". They were calling for a return to good old mass transit options, which would have still been strongly in living memory in the 1960s in most American cities.

Agree.

Even more absurd is the assertion in the OP that steam-powered vehicles could have:

>But for a few historical contingencies, either model [lead-acid or steam boiler] could have rendered its gas-powered alternatives obsolete.

Deep cycle lead acid powered vehicles have some significant costs in usability and maintenance, and in a world where the oil price can just jump by a factor of ten as it did in the OPEC crisis, we might have paid them if we weren't insulated by the world's largest domestic oil industry and military hyperpower, and also if we weren't increasingly owned by the auto & energy industries.

More relevant would be everything that isn't a car. Most of the world wasn't built with huge-tract low-density single-use zoning. They walk or take the tram to get most places. We were busy literally paving over our tracks and sidewalks.

We basically postponed the r&d of one for 60 years and funded the other with infinite petro dollars. It really isn't that absurd.

> we're having trouble displacing ICE with electric now

Yeah, now, after 60 years of designing every single aspect of our modern lives around gas and gas cars, how surprising indeed ...

What great innovations would have been made 60 years ago to the lead acid battery powered car that would have put them on par with contemporary ICE, to say nothing of surpassing it?

The various players in the ICE and oil industries had a common practice of buying out battery technology developers or their patents to keep advancement off the market. Lithium ion batteries were first developed in the 1970s, and could have come to market much earlier if not for those practices.

You're missing the point. We rebuilt the built environment based around internal combustion cars capabilities. Everything became single use zoning, so you need to drive from your house to the store, school, work, etc. None of that needed to be done (and has had severe impacts on our society across the board). If we had been limited to early 1900s electric vehicles, we could have stayed with more traditional mixed use city planning. Folks could still use cars to go where they needed, but even more importantly, they could walk! And for longer distances, take a train. Not only would we have been better off pollution wise, we would have been better off physically, mentally, and morally (not had to support middle eastern authoritarians).

> Everything became single use zoning, so you need to drive from your house to the store, school, work, etc. None of that needed to be done

But let's not pretend that it was forced upon us. Most people liked their single-family suburban home in quiet neighborhoods without a lot of businesses nearby with their crowds, traffic, and noise. Nobody was ever prevented from continuing to live in their inner-city apartments, they just mostly prefered not to, when they had the choice.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I'm pretty quick to demonize suburbs (and cars), but there were a lot of attractive things about them (and still are). We've had more than 60 years to live with them and it is pretty clear now what their problems are. I'd like it if we could move beyond them and bring back mixed use zoning as the default. My preference would be villages instead of subdivisions (i.e., clusters of housing and places of work with higher densities than suburbs, leaving the countryside intact, more like Europe).

Without the gasoline car, we would never have built the interstate system. So imagine a world where a similar amount of money would have been dumped into mass transit instead of the interstate system. Imagine a world with high speed trains between major cities and EV's for local transport.

For anybody not within 100 miles of a major city, they'd likely have gotten electricity earlier in a world which depended on that for transport. And stopping to charge for an hour every 100 miles is still a heck of a lot better than the alternative of a horse & buggy.

I’m very possibly missing your point. If so, I apologize. But the interstate highway system was started in 1956, 11 years before Petris’ proposal.

With the exception of additional money going to mass transit (which doesn't seem like a guarantee at all), that world sounds worse in every way than the one we ended up with.

Remember railroads of the day were all privately owned. There was passenger service between most major cities (at least where there was enough ridership to make it profitable) but that ended as people prefered the convenience of traveling in their own cars on their own schedules as opposed to waiting until tomorrow for the next train.

> We basically postponed the r&d of one for 60 years and funded the other with infinite petro dollars.

The R & D would have started much further away from a usable product. Maybe we would have got electric cars earlier, but not as early as the 60s or 70s.

> Yeah, now, after 60 years of designing every single aspect of our modern lives around gas and gas cars, how surprising indeed

Maybe in the US, but not in much of the world. I never owned a car when I lived in London, nor for most of the time I lived in Manchester. Lots of other cities are around the world are better in terms of managing without a car at all.

The need for petrol cars is greatest for people who do long trips. The need for a car depends on distances, what people need to transport (goods, kids...). and the availability of public transport.

Cities are much nicer with fewer cars and when easier to walk around.

> The R & D would have started much further away from a usable product. Maybe we would have got electric cars earlier, but not as early as the 60s or 70s.

Electric cars were a usable product in 1910, superior in most cases to the alternative of a horse and buggy. If they hadn't been outcompeted by gasoline cars they would have gotten better continuously and would never been unusable or inviable.

It's interesting too looking back on the early politics of the electric car versus the gas car. The electric car was the "lady's car" because it was less messy, more reliable, easier to use, quieter, more efficient (higher range in some early cases). The gas car was the "man's car" because it was louder, harder to start, harder to maintain, needed a fuel that was harder to acquire, was overall less reliable.

There's an interesting alternate history tale to be told if the Ford Motor Company had been lead instead of by Henry Ford by his wife Clara Bryant Ford (who was a big proponent for electric cars, in addition to being an interesting suffragette).

My wording was poor, what I meant was not competitive with petrol cars as early as the 60s or 70s.

I'm not sure what your point is, then. We already know what happens when gasoline cars are able to compete freely against electric cars. The speculation is what would have happened if gasoline cars weren't allowed to compete freely, either due to an act of God or an act of legislature.

> Maybe in the US, but not in much of the world. I never owned a car when I lived in London, nor for most of the time I lived in Manchester. L

Without gas you'd starve in a week in any major city...

I also don't own a car, never owned one either btw

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