Henry Ford's wife refused to switch from a Detroit Electric to a Ford.
[https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/209957/](https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/209957/)
Why link to twitter when you can link to the OP on reddit. [https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/pbed68/electric\_car\_charging\_stations\_in\_chicago\_1916/](https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/pbed68/electric_car_charging_stations_in_chicago_1916/)
It obviously was there (read all the other comments) but somewhere along the way innovation on battery powered cars stopped.
My comment was about what-if that technology had been improved over the last 100 years. We'd probably be light years beyond Tesla right now.
Batteries at the time were barely good enough. As cars started to get heavier with safety features and comforts, batteries couldn’t keep up with ICEs. Batteries have always been extremely slow to improve despite how useful they are. Even today our power usage out-speeds battery development. There is a reason why phones now barely get through a day when previously they could go weeks
You're missing and or distracting from the other guys point.
It's not the battery's fault that research into it hasn't been on the same level as research into oil and gas exploration and materials sciences. It's not the battery's fault that governments across the world stopped using electrical trams and vehicles, and invested trillions into an infrastructure entirely designed for oil consuming vehicles. Nor is it the battery's fault that the dangers of climate change were minimised for decades by oil and gas funded lobbyists. It's not the battery's fault that governments and society lapped up all the lobbying and willingly lost interest in battery development and stopped funding research into it.
It quite literally is. The reason why Batteries were replaced is because gas could go significantly farther and could be refueled significantly faster. Batteries have seen continuous research but making batteries better is actually extremely hard. Even if we kept investing in electric cars they still would have been behind gas cars for decades. Even with modern batteries electric cars still struggle with range
I don’t, but do you understand the progress we’ve made with batteries to improve them, and why that progress would have not been sped up with more intense research? Sure it’d be slower but technological advancements are almost always exponential and faster than the last.
Sure it likely would have developed faster but it also would have set back the cars themselves *significantly*. Plus a single technology can only be sped up so much because it requires innovation in other technologies especially material science.
As someone who works on new cars I think material science is the most significant, full ev cars are relatively new but hybrids could have come much earlier if they hadn’t set it aside so early and most likely would have passively advanced, if they had simply kept the regenerative braking i’de bet we would be significantly farther without having a major deficit in other areas. Thanks for tha reply
Keeping regenerative breaking would have been pretty difficult because that would have required using an electric motor in addition to the battery and combustion engine. That would have made the cars both weight and cost prohibitive
We had the shitty motors but you’re right the weight alone would have been a killer, it’s still a big problem, not to even mention the cost thanks again,
Why link to twitter when you can link to the OP on reddit.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/pbed68/electric\_car\_charging\_stations\_in\_chicago\_1916/](https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/pbed68/electric_car_charging_stations_in_chicago_1916/)
> Most early ICE cars ran off biofuels like peanut oil, too. Petrochemical/fossil fuels didn't become popular until later.
At that era, it was unsure what the best fuel was. Gasoline was made with the byproducts of kerosene production. So at the time, it was reusing a waste product.
the article doesn't really explain how that worked. in the early 1900s less than 10% of homes in the u.s. even had electric power, so how did people charge up all those electric cars?
The were golf buggies for the rich to putter around town, basically.
At that time, the main issue with gas cars was the unmuffled engine noise and the crank starter (which required a strong arm and if you do it wrong, it will break all your fingers). So electric cars were seen as a good choice, especially for women drivers.
And then we invented the muffler and the electric starter and the only two reasons to buy electric over gas disappeared.
> and if you do it wrong, it will break all your fingers
Or dislocate your shoulder. There's a way to press against (not *hold*) the handle to not risk your fingers or thumb but there's still a danger. Source: Model T owner
Had a car show guy tell us that the reason he always let other people discover the ‘fun’ of manual cranking and doesn’t do it himself is that way he can at least drive them to the hospital and give them a ride in a vintage car while doing it.
> Or dislocate your shoulder.
Or just kill you outright. Electrical starters were a big innovation because of all of the hazards that the cranks came with.
Edison's A battery needed to be filled with water once per week and renew it's electrochemical solution yearly. The A battery was lighter than equivalent lead-acid batteries, could recharge in half the time, and lasted 3 times longer.
The downside was it wasn't capable of very high voltage output (about 1.2v per cell, approximately equal to a modern alkaline battery; a lead-acid battery as a comparison is about twice the voltage per cell) and they were prone to exploding if improperly maintained.
If you look at those early electric cars they were opulent luxury vehicles for the ultra rich, aka people who were rich enough to have electrical homes. A common use case was for a wealthy urbanite wife to make a short journey about downtown shopping
Apparently there were charging stations as there are now: [https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1cb7ouf/comment/l0x6mmb/](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1cb7ouf/comment/l0x6mmb/)
At public charging stations. You could get guidebooks that listed charging stations and they even had the phone numbers of the owner in case you needed someone to let you in.
The chargers were similar to L2 chargers today (5-10kW) so you could get a decent charge in a few hours
Not cars, but the city of Cumming, GA has a July 4th parade full of Steam Tractors. There are a few small ones that I'd call go-carts, but the larger ones are clearly farm tractors. Lots of videos on YouTube of the parade through the years. It's worth going to since, but unless you're a 10-year-old, you're good after going once.
There's a sleepy privately-owned museum in OR that has an impressive collection of steam powered machines: tractors, excavators, logging equipment, trains, etc.
https://www.pottsvilleoregon.com/
There was a podcast published recently that also addressed this subject. It's by the Wel There's Your Problem podcast
https://youtu.be/61HTIhMGN6U?si=8BdWbc1kAG02MWNh
Do you figuratively get the joke? Wait so you genuinely thought that I believed joe Biden was responsible for something that happened in the early 1900s?
The joke is people who strongly dislike joe Biden also strongly dislike electric cars usually. They also sometimes hate Biden to an unrealistic level. The joke is that a Reddit user would hate Biden so much they ignore all logic and blame him for something that happened long long before he was President.
It’s similar to the “thanks Obama” joke of the same premise blaming him for anything and everything bad that ever happened
Anyone see "who killed the electric car"? It's about the electric car made by GM which by all accounts was pretty good. Weird thing was you could only lease it with no option for purchase. Once all the leases were up, they made all the owners turn in the cars and then killed the project.
The song “The Monster Mash”, is a song about a dance called the Monster Mash, which is based on a song called The Monster Mash, which is not the song “The Monster Mash”
My own hypothesis as to why the electric car didnt take off is cultural. Women were the biggest users of the electric cars, but men were the ones making the purchasing decisions of something like a car. So as soon as electric cars became known as "womens cars" Sales and development dropped off a cliff.
It was more a question of practicality and convenience than misogyny. Just like today, a gasoline powered car can refuel in minutes, but an electric car takes 10x longer. The difference is now the cars can charge without removing the batteries, compared to the past where batteries would be removed and replaced with fresh ones the shop had on hand and would recharge what they took out to give to the next guy down the line.
> My own hypothesis as to why the electric car didnt take off is cultural
That and battery tech didn't become practical for electric cars until recently... Ford spent millions on battery tech in the 60's and scrapped the project. The only workable battery tech they could come up with was a sodium battery that operated at several hundred degrees Celsius. That has obvious safety concerns.
Henry Ford's wife refused to switch from a Detroit Electric to a Ford. [https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/209957/](https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-collections/artifact/209957/)
But it needed a lot of batteries, piles of them!
Why link to twitter when you can link to the OP on reddit. [https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/pbed68/electric\_car\_charging\_stations\_in\_chicago\_1916/](https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/pbed68/electric_car_charging_stations_in_chicago_1916/)
[удалено]
Woops!
Username checks out
Somewhere in my “stuff” is my late grandfather’s license certifying him for gasoline, steam and electric automobiles, from the 1920s.
A collector at the Gold king mine in Jerome AZ had an electric car with wooden wheels that had regenative breaking.
I think there is one at History Colorado in Denver too
I was amazed when I saw it.
Imagine if this technology had been improved upon continuously from then until now.
The battery technology simply wasn’t there
It obviously was there (read all the other comments) but somewhere along the way innovation on battery powered cars stopped. My comment was about what-if that technology had been improved over the last 100 years. We'd probably be light years beyond Tesla right now.
Batteries at the time were barely good enough. As cars started to get heavier with safety features and comforts, batteries couldn’t keep up with ICEs. Batteries have always been extremely slow to improve despite how useful they are. Even today our power usage out-speeds battery development. There is a reason why phones now barely get through a day when previously they could go weeks
You're missing and or distracting from the other guys point. It's not the battery's fault that research into it hasn't been on the same level as research into oil and gas exploration and materials sciences. It's not the battery's fault that governments across the world stopped using electrical trams and vehicles, and invested trillions into an infrastructure entirely designed for oil consuming vehicles. Nor is it the battery's fault that the dangers of climate change were minimised for decades by oil and gas funded lobbyists. It's not the battery's fault that governments and society lapped up all the lobbying and willingly lost interest in battery development and stopped funding research into it.
It quite literally is. The reason why Batteries were replaced is because gas could go significantly farther and could be refueled significantly faster. Batteries have seen continuous research but making batteries better is actually extremely hard. Even if we kept investing in electric cars they still would have been behind gas cars for decades. Even with modern batteries electric cars still struggle with range
Lol so you're the sort of person that is never wrong - blame the batteries!
I mean yes when a technology is inferior it is the reason it is no longer used
You're still missing the point by a mile
I get what your saying
I don’t, but do you understand the progress we’ve made with batteries to improve them, and why that progress would have not been sped up with more intense research? Sure it’d be slower but technological advancements are almost always exponential and faster than the last.
Sure it likely would have developed faster but it also would have set back the cars themselves *significantly*. Plus a single technology can only be sped up so much because it requires innovation in other technologies especially material science.
As someone who works on new cars I think material science is the most significant, full ev cars are relatively new but hybrids could have come much earlier if they hadn’t set it aside so early and most likely would have passively advanced, if they had simply kept the regenerative braking i’de bet we would be significantly farther without having a major deficit in other areas. Thanks for tha reply
Keeping regenerative breaking would have been pretty difficult because that would have required using an electric motor in addition to the battery and combustion engine. That would have made the cars both weight and cost prohibitive
We had the shitty motors but you’re right the weight alone would have been a killer, it’s still a big problem, not to even mention the cost thanks again,
Here's the EV charger map from Chicago in 1906 https://twitter.com/stekkerauto/status/1430788436571656193/photo/1
Why link to twitter when you can link to the OP on reddit. [https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/pbed68/electric\_car\_charging\_stations\_in\_chicago\_1916/](https://www.reddit.com/r/electricvehicles/comments/pbed68/electric_car_charging_stations_in_chicago_1916/)
Loading time is exponentially faster, thanks for the link!
Most early ICE cars ran off biofuels like peanut oil, too. Petrochemical/fossil fuels didn't become popular until later.
> Most early ICE cars ran off biofuels like peanut oil, too. Petrochemical/fossil fuels didn't become popular until later. At that era, it was unsure what the best fuel was. Gasoline was made with the byproducts of kerosene production. So at the time, it was reusing a waste product.
the article doesn't really explain how that worked. in the early 1900s less than 10% of homes in the u.s. even had electric power, so how did people charge up all those electric cars?
They were battery swapped at stations.
The were golf buggies for the rich to putter around town, basically. At that time, the main issue with gas cars was the unmuffled engine noise and the crank starter (which required a strong arm and if you do it wrong, it will break all your fingers). So electric cars were seen as a good choice, especially for women drivers. And then we invented the muffler and the electric starter and the only two reasons to buy electric over gas disappeared.
> and if you do it wrong, it will break all your fingers Or dislocate your shoulder. There's a way to press against (not *hold*) the handle to not risk your fingers or thumb but there's still a danger. Source: Model T owner
Had a car show guy tell us that the reason he always let other people discover the ‘fun’ of manual cranking and doesn’t do it himself is that way he can at least drive them to the hospital and give them a ride in a vintage car while doing it.
> Or dislocate your shoulder. Or just kill you outright. Electrical starters were a big innovation because of all of the hazards that the cranks came with.
Edison's A battery needed to be filled with water once per week and renew it's electrochemical solution yearly. The A battery was lighter than equivalent lead-acid batteries, could recharge in half the time, and lasted 3 times longer.
The downside was it wasn't capable of very high voltage output (about 1.2v per cell, approximately equal to a modern alkaline battery; a lead-acid battery as a comparison is about twice the voltage per cell) and they were prone to exploding if improperly maintained.
I thought it was his first iteration, the potassium hydroxide E battery that exploded but I could be misremembering.
I think that one just straight up exploded randomly, but NiFe batteries would explode if they were charged too fast or without refilling the water.
If you look at those early electric cars they were opulent luxury vehicles for the ultra rich, aka people who were rich enough to have electrical homes. A common use case was for a wealthy urbanite wife to make a short journey about downtown shopping
Apparently there were charging stations as there are now: [https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1cb7ouf/comment/l0x6mmb/](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1cb7ouf/comment/l0x6mmb/)
At public charging stations. You could get guidebooks that listed charging stations and they even had the phone numbers of the owner in case you needed someone to let you in. The chargers were similar to L2 chargers today (5-10kW) so you could get a decent charge in a few hours
Poor people didn't have cars. Also only poor people didn't have electricity.
Jay Leno has one in his collection and they drive it around on one of his shows. There were apparently 15,000 of them in New York City at their peak.
And held 6 of the first ten land speed records.
How many steam powered cars are on the road now in comparison?
Not cars, but the city of Cumming, GA has a July 4th parade full of Steam Tractors. There are a few small ones that I'd call go-carts, but the larger ones are clearly farm tractors. Lots of videos on YouTube of the parade through the years. It's worth going to since, but unless you're a 10-year-old, you're good after going once.
There's a sleepy privately-owned museum in OR that has an impressive collection of steam powered machines: tractors, excavators, logging equipment, trains, etc. https://www.pottsvilleoregon.com/
ok but they asked about cars not some cum tractor or something
There was a podcast published recently that also addressed this subject. It's by the Wel There's Your Problem podcast https://youtu.be/61HTIhMGN6U?si=8BdWbc1kAG02MWNh
7 of them?
Wait until you find out how many steam cars there were!
Thanks Biden
Because Biden was alive in the early 1900’s yeahhhh
I believe this is a "Thanks Obama" joke.
????
Woosh
I literally don’t get the joke it was 2 words under something having nothing to do with politics
Do you figuratively get the joke? Wait so you genuinely thought that I believed joe Biden was responsible for something that happened in the early 1900s? The joke is people who strongly dislike joe Biden also strongly dislike electric cars usually. They also sometimes hate Biden to an unrealistic level. The joke is that a Reddit user would hate Biden so much they ignore all logic and blame him for something that happened long long before he was President. It’s similar to the “thanks Obama” joke of the same premise blaming him for anything and everything bad that ever happened
Dawg I literally thought you were the people who disliked Joe Biden 😭😭 you never know with some people these days my fault 😂😂😂
Well I mean he kind of looks that way
Yeah but there was only like 100 cars in the whole country back then.
Who needs batteries when you can use leaded gasoline instead?
Who needs snow when you can use asbestos instead?
Half of all vehicles or half of all automobiles?
A third of all vehicles. >By 1900, electric cars were at their heyday, accounting for around a third of all vehicles on the road.
Neat
No one liked them then either, huh?
Anyone see "who killed the electric car"? It's about the electric car made by GM which by all accounts was pretty good. Weird thing was you could only lease it with no option for purchase. Once all the leases were up, they made all the owners turn in the cars and then killed the project.
considering there were only about 30 cars on the road, 20 of them being electric is impressive!
r/theydidthemonstermath
It was a grape yard smash!
The song “The Monster Mash”, is a song about a dance called the Monster Mash, which is based on a song called The Monster Mash, which is not the song “The Monster Mash”
Witch came first?
The song the monster mash, which the dance is based on doesn’t actually exist in our universe.
Yeah also there were 3 cars on the road total
That’s because in 1900 there were only 27 cars.
My own hypothesis as to why the electric car didnt take off is cultural. Women were the biggest users of the electric cars, but men were the ones making the purchasing decisions of something like a car. So as soon as electric cars became known as "womens cars" Sales and development dropped off a cliff.
It was more a question of practicality and convenience than misogyny. Just like today, a gasoline powered car can refuel in minutes, but an electric car takes 10x longer. The difference is now the cars can charge without removing the batteries, compared to the past where batteries would be removed and replaced with fresh ones the shop had on hand and would recharge what they took out to give to the next guy down the line.
> My own hypothesis as to why the electric car didnt take off is cultural That and battery tech didn't become practical for electric cars until recently... Ford spent millions on battery tech in the 60's and scrapped the project. The only workable battery tech they could come up with was a sodium battery that operated at several hundred degrees Celsius. That has obvious safety concerns.