Forward Drive

The Race to Build the Clean Car of the Future

Jim Motavalli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138993075
• eBook ISBN: 9781136534102
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

This comprehensive account of the past, present and future of the automobile examines the key trends, key technologies and key players involved in the race to develop clean, environmentally friendly vehicles that are affordable and that do not compromise on safety or design. Undertaking a rigorous interrogation of our global dependency on oil, the author demonstrates just how unwise and unnecessary this is in light of current developments such as the fuel cell revolution and the increasing viability of hybrid cars, which use both petrol and electricity - innovations that could signal a new era of clean, sustainable energy. The arguments put forward draw on support from an eclectic range of sources - including industry insiders, scientists, economists and environmentalists - to make for an enlightening read.

CHAPTER

1

PULLING THE PLUG:
A BRIEF HISTORY
OF ALTERNATIVE
MOTION

I knew electric and steam cars had a colourful past, but I didn’t know just how colourful until I delved into the literature from the earliest days of motoring. Moving people from one place to another has never been an easy business, and the florid commentaries and brightly coloured illustrations that began appearing as early as the 18th century reveal all the political passions and social conventions of their time. Steam cars, driven by gout-ridden dandies, upset the English peasantry’s horses. Manure-shovelling ‘dirt boys’ were put out of work in New York. Women driving horseless carriages shocked the proper Bostonians. I quickly concluded that there’s more to our evolving transportation history than a simple recitation of technological advances.

The misfortunes of long-ago automotive inventors, geniuses and madmen, struggling (usually in vain) to interest a fickle public and overcome vested interests, offer a mirror for our own troubled times. It’s never simple to buck tradition, even when that tradition is destructive to all concerned. Looking back from our omniscient vantage point, we might think that our ancestors would have been glad to see all those troublesome equines put out to pasture; but today’s cars won’t go gently to history’s junkyards, either.

Most people think of the car as the invention that ushered out the 19th century and welcomed in the 20th with a blast of exhaust smoke. It was in 1894, for instance, that Frank and Charles Duryea of Springfield, Massachusetts, took their first orders for a petrol powered buggy, giving tentative birth to a new industry that would come to influence everything from urban planning to social life.¹

But the very earliest cars, a strange and wonderful melange of the practical and the eccentric, were built hundreds of years beforethe Duryea brothers took their first test drives down Springfield’s Maple Street, and they ran on steam. That the world heaved a massive sigh of indifference at their uncertain and halting appearance on the quagmires then known as roads speaks volumes to our present predicament, when the thought of being without automobiles is impossible to contemplate.

Leonardo da Vinci thought about carriages that could move under their own power in the 15th century, and left drawings showing rudimentary steering and transmission systems. In 1510, the German Renaissance painter Albrecht Durer sketched a complex and undoubtedly very heavy royal carriage, propelled by muscle power through geared cranks. The two yeomen pictured in Durer’s drawing would have had to be stout-hearted indeed to get the richly adorned vehicle moving.

THE AGE OF STEAM

It’s a long way from fanciful etchings to working cars, but those were not long in coming. Little is known of the Flemish Jesuit priest and astronomer Ferdinand Verbiest, but he is reliably believed not only to have mapped the boundary lines between Russia and China, but also to have created a miniature four-wheeled steam carriage for the Chinese Emperor Khang Hsi in the period between 1665 and 1680.² The opinions of the Emperor and his courtiers about this undeniably advanced, self-propelled machine are not known, but Verbiest left detailed plans of his two-foot-long unmanned ‘car’, and working models have been constructed from them. Was this steamer the first automobile? Maybe. At least until the first practical internal-combustion engine was developed in 1860, constructing a workable steam car for the road became the personal obsession of any number of scientific geniuses/eccentrics, very fewof whom received anything but ribald laughter and scorn for their trouble.

Automotive historians can only imagine the scene in Paris in 1769 when the Frenchman Nicholas Cugnot, a distinguished military engineer in the service of the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, retired from active duty and began working, under royal commission, on his idea for a steam-powered military truck. The finished motor carriage may have been capable of only six miles per hour, but it moved. This, the world’s first automotive test drive, sufficiently loosened the royal purse strings to fund a second and larger model. (Such bottom-line requirements have influenced automotive testing ever since.)

Cugnot’s second steam carriage still exists in a French museum, and it’s a strange sight indeed. It has front-wheel drive, for one thing, with the boiler hanging off the nose, creating such an unbalanced weight distribution that the vehicle could barely be steered. This perilous situation was probably responsible for what became the world’s first car accident. According to some accounts, the carriage hit a wall and overturned,³ landing its designer in jail. Small wonder, then, that the carriage never turned a wheel again.

The French, who invented the bicycle and then let the fruits of their invention slip away to the US and the UK, did the same thingwith the car. After Cugnot, the scene shifted to the UK, where steam carriages were quickly adopted into public transportation, which, had roads been better, might have become a considerable force. The significance of the technical breakthroughs was matched only by the public’s apathy towards them. Who could imagine that these outlandish contraptions, easily outrun by even the lamest horse, would ever become practical?

The Scottish pioneer James Watt, whose technical innovations made the Age of Steam possible, applied for and was granted a patent for a steam carriage in 1786, but was wise enough not to actually build it. Watt was so afraid of explosions from high-pressure boilers that he had a covenant written into the lease for any potential tenants of his home, Heathfield Hall, stipulating that ‘No steam carriage shall on any pretext be allowed to approach the house.’⁴

Richard Trevithick, a pioneer of the high-pressure steam engine, developed and patented a locomotive-like carriage with a boiler and smokestack that attained a heady nine miles per hour on Christmas Eve, 1802. Trevithick’s huge car, which had eight-foot rear wheels, made several relatively trouble-free trips, although during one the vehicle went a wry and tore out some garden railing. The London Steam Carriage ‘proved to be a financial disappointment’.⁵

Another intrepid British inventor, Goldsworthy Gurney of the Surrey Institute, built a long-distance steam car that, in 1825, madean 85-mile round-trip journey without incident in ten hours. His coach was later damaged by anti-machinery Luddites, who, according to a contemporary account, ‘considered all machinery directly injurious to their interests. . . [and] set upon the carriage and its occupants, seriously injuring Mr Gurney and his assistant engineer, who had to be taken to Bath in an unconscious condition.’⁶

US steam pioneers also faced ridicule and censure. No one remembers Oliver Evans today, but this unassuming and notably unsuccessful early-19th-century engineer built the first self-propelled vehicle in the US – and it also swam. This unsung mechanical genius also constructed the first high-pressure boiler in the US, and created an automation system for a grain mill that prefigured Henry Ford by 150 years.⁷

Evans, a Philadelphian, built his 20-tonne Orukter Amphibolosin 1805 as a dredger to excavate the city’s waterfront. To get it to the Schuykill River, a mile from his workshop, he drove it up Market Street at four miles per hour, attracting crowds. The 25 cents he charged onlookers was the only money Evans ever made from steam vehicles. The Amphibolos was notably unsuccessful as a dredger. It was sold for scrap, and Evans’s later plan to build a fleet of produce carrying trucks was rejected by the Lancaster Turnpike Company, which concluded that they’d probably shake to pieces on the terrible roads. They were undoubtedly right, and besides, the US, like Britain, was developing a fast and efficient rail system. By 1850, there were 9000 miles of railroads in the US, and nothing but muddy horse tracks for other traffic between most major towns and cities.

Given that, it’s remarkable that an unbowed Evans predicted in 1812 that: ‘The time will come when people will travel in stages moved by steam engines, from one city to another, almost as fast as birds fly. . . A carriage will set out from Washington in the morning, the passengers will breakfast in Baltimore, dine in Philadelphia and sup in New York the same day.’⁸

The inventors struggled to make their fire-belching vehicles practical, and an English entrepreneur named Walter Hancock was the first to offer regular passenger routes of the type Evans imagined. Between 1824 and 1836, Hancock had nine steam coaches taking on paying customers. One, sure to terrify passengers with the nickname ‘Autopsy’, travelled between central London and Islington, hauling three omnibuses, a stagecoach and 50 passengers.⁹

But Hancock’s revolutionary bus service didn’t attract as many brave souls as it needed; it lasted only five months before failing financially. It probably would be going too far to say a conspiracy killed the steam coaches, but certainly the powerful and established railroad interests threw some spikes in the road. As Ken Purdy reports in his classic book Kings of the Road:

. . . [T]he railroads of the day took a very dim view indeed of the kind of competition steam coaches obviously could offer, and arrangements to make things difficult for the upstarts were not hard to contrive. A four-shilling toll-gate charge for horse drawn coaches, for example, could easily be raised to two pounds and eight shillings for a steam coach. . . The steam coaches had received, in 1831, a clear bill of health from the House of Commons, but even Parliament could not prevail against the will of ‘the interests’ – not the first time it has turned out so.¹⁰

Even more crippling than high road taxes was an infamous piece of legislation known colloquially as the ‘Red Flag Act’, passed in 1865, which restricted self-propelled vehicles to two miles an hour in town and four in the country. In addition, a person carrying a red flag had to walk in front of anything moving under its own power.

In the next half-century, steam carriages would make their mark, particularly in the US. One notably innovative model, shaped like a railway locomotive, was commissioned by the government Native American agent Joseph Renshaw Brown to carry food and supplies to isolated groups of Sioux before the Civil War, although the bad roads in the hinterlands of Minnesota made it impractical for the purpose. More successful were the brightly painted fire engines that appeared in several cities after the war was over. Steam cars survived the onslaught of internal combustion in the first decade of the 20th century, and marques such as Stanley, Locomobile and White had many admirers who loved the cars’ silent operation, range and absence of a crank handle (a necessary accessory in the days before electric starting). This latter advantage, shared by electric cars, was a prime consideration in an era when misapplied cranking could break your arm.

But Stanleys and Whites could take up to half an hour to work up ‘a head of steam’, consumed great amounts of water and wood fuel, and scared people who read accounts of boiler explosions. When rapid technological advancements radically improved the petrol engine after 1905, the market for steam cars dried up. By 1911, White and Locomobile abandoned steamers and switched to petrol power.

THE ELECTRIC CAR PLUGS IN

Electrics lasted longer, though they too would eventually lose the race to the wider-ranging petrol car. The dignified electric at least put up a pretty good fight before succumbing.

As the British authors of the book Automania suggest, the horrendous roads that had done much to stifle development of the early steam car actually worked to the advantage of the first electrics: ‘Until American roads were improved, almost all cars kept within the city limits where the short range of the electric car was no great drawback.’¹¹

How bad were the roads? The US had 27,000 miles of them as early as the 1830s, but most were dirt tracks. In 1903, while both gas and electric cars were busy being born, only 10 per cent of US roads were paved,¹² which helps to explain why the first automobiles were inevitably ‘high wheelers’. In addition to the seas of mud that formed whenever it rained, horse traffic turned streets into cesspools. In cities like London and New York, armies of street sweepers were employed to clean up an average of 45 pounds of dung per horse per day. One consequence of the motor age was reflected in a contemporary British postcard showing a sombre ‘dirt boy’ watching the whizzing car traffic;‘ Nothing Doing’ reads the caption.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that the quiet, clean electric car found favour. Electric vehicles grew out of early experiments with electric trains and trolleys and became possible only with the invention of the practical storage battery in 1859. The first true electric car may well have been a three-wheeled carriage made by Magnus Volk of Brighton in 1888.¹³ In company with that 17th-century steam car built for the Chinese court, the earliest electrics also drew royal patrons, such as the four-passenger carriage complete with one horsepower motor and 24-cell battery that Immisch & Company built for the Sultan of Turkey, also in 1888.¹⁴

Electrics made their way to America soon after. William Morrison of Des Moines, Iowa, made a stir at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893 with a six-passenger electric wagon that carried full loads of delighted patrons.¹⁵ To them, the self-propelled automobile was a fascinating novelty – a toy of no immediate practical use, since trains occupied the only usable roadbeds, and trams (there were 850 systems in the US by 1895) worked the streets in cities.

Electric cars first made a discernible impact on American lives through their use as taxis, particularly in New York City. By 1898, the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company had a fleet of 12 sturdy and stylish electric cabs – with well-appointed interiors able to accommodate gentlemen in top hats – plying the city streets. As in contemporary horse carriages, the driver sat outside on a raised platform.¹⁶

Through small-scale successful businesses like this, the electric car gradually won acceptance. By 1900, Americans could choose their source of motive power, and at the first-ever National Automobile Show that November in New York City, polled patrons overwhelmingly chose electric as their first choice, followed closely by steam. Petrol came a distant third, getting only 5 per cent of the vote. There were 1681 steam, 1575 electric and only 936 gasoline cars made that year.¹⁷

Unlike the steam car tinkerers, who were sometimes lucky to escape with their lives after demonstrating their inventions in the village square, many of the early petrol car pioneers became industrialists whose names are well-remembered today. Gottlieb Daimler, Henry Ford, Ransom Olds, Carl ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and Abbrivations
• Chapter 1 Pulling the Plug: A Brief History of Alternative Motion
• Chapter 2 A Dizzying Ride: Internal Combustion’s Rapid Rise and Coming Decline
• Chapter 3 Engines of Ingenuity: New Technologies for the Clean Car
• Chapter 4 Road Warriors and Early Adopters: Living With a Battery-powered EV
• Chapter 5 U-Turn: Getting Serious About Green Cars
• Chapter 6 The Global Green Car: Europe on the Fast Track
• Chapter 7 A New Sun Rises in Japan
• Chapter 8 Thinking About Tomorrow: Visionaries, Pessimists and Investors at the Crossroads
• Chapter 9 Clearing the Air: Clean Cars and Sustainable Transportation in the 21st Century
• List of Interviewees
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index