I’ve seen one of these at a private museum in Arizona. It was pretty small but for it’s day I could see it being useful in relation to what was avaliable then.
There’s the more recent example of GM’s late 1900s EV1 with the last gen model having a range of 160 miles from NiMH batteries.
There’s various reasons why GM recalled all of the leased units and crushed most of them despite protests by customers that wanted to keep theirs. Some point to big oil, others to costs of the units and a lack of parts sales parts and service not needed for the units. I suspect dealers and oil would not be happy with the product.
The cars for their time are revolutionary due to being a non retrofit built from the ground up. They were among the first to use aluminum and plastics. They didn’t really dent.
One famous movie director hid his EV1 from GM and eventually they allowed him to keep his leased unit. The remaining ones that were not crushed had their drive trains disabled or removed before being donated to museums or technical institutions.
So we have been struggling with this lesson more than once. Unfortunately it’s not a matter with only one concern involved.
More recently the emotions of many have been stoked against electric cars with social media. I don’t think I’ll own an electric anytime soon due to my type of driving but I’m not out to get them either in my daily life like some are.
You have to think those that roll coal, park in electric charging spots with their lifted ICE trucks, and vandalize electric cars, don’t have much going for them in their lives for this to be a focus. It’s hard being a mouth breather I gather…
You misunderstand, being a mouth breather is incredibly easy. You don’t have to think for yourself or care about anyone but yourself. What’s difficult is being intelligent and empathetic.
Ignorance is bliss.
Is this a negative comment by that guy? I take it as, “don’t half-execute ideas”. But it appears everyone agrees he’s saying electric cars sucked then and will now.
I just find that hard for even dummies to fall for, we all know how much technology moves in a decade, nevermind a century.
Unless it’s a satirical page, it’s called “car enthusiasts suck”, so I’d read it as “we got out muscled by big oil once before, let’s not let it happen again”.
Edit: In comparison, the famous Ford Model T went up to 42mph compared to the 25mph of this electric car.
It had a 10 gallon petrol tank which I can’t easily find the fuel economy stats for. Needless to say I expect the range of the Ford to be much higher than the electric car.
For a lot of people, I imagine it would mostly have came down to the same arguments as today: range, size, and upfront cost.
Electric vehicles aren’t the problem, the fact that they are really expensive large computers with wheels that phone home constantly and track your every move, can be disabled remotely by the manufacturer, require mobile apps that track you and phone home constantly is the problem.
And they need OS updates to patch potentially fatal bugs.
Modern fossil fuel cars are unfortunately no different…
But you can buy an old fossil fuel car.
For now. In twenty years time the current fleet of newish cars will be the old junk.
My family drives 20 year old cars daily.
I like old cars, but the point is there will be a point at which getting a car that is as uncomplicated as a 1990s Japanese sedan will end. In 20 years time you’d have to deal with all sorts of electric and software issues.
It used to be that you could just take out the cassette player and insert a Bluetooth radio, for instance. In modern cars everything is integrated software and it sure as hell won’t be maintained by car manufacturers after 10 years at most.
There are old fossils?
They’re all old, silly
Well you could probably buy this old electric car too!
Just a reminder that for the most part a car with an electric motor is very much powered by the combustion of fossil fuels. A grid without fossil fuel inputs is still a pipe dream.
Unfortunately true.
But even then, a fossil fuel power plant is more efficient at capturing the energy in the fuel than a car engine. So an electric vehicle still emits less CO2 per mile driven, even when the power used to charge it is entirely generated from fossil fuels.
My “old” 2017 Ford Fiesta weighed around 1100 kg, and could drive around 17 km per liter of gasoline. Gasoline has about 9.5 kWh worth of energy per liter, so that’s 0.55 kWh/km. My new Hyundai Ioniq 5 weighs around 2300 kg (yes about twice as much) and drives 5 km per kWh. So that’s only 0.2 kWh/km. So a car weighing twice as much expends less than half as much energy per km…
Luckily there’s many places around the world where fossil fuels are rapidly being phased out.
For example, Scandinavia, where I live: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuels-share-energy?country=SWE~NOR~FIN~DNK
Kind of a red herring when even 100% fossil fuel power is far more efficient than a car engine. Many US states are projecting <5% fossil fuel reliance for the grid within 15 years.
This is a modern car thing and not in the least bit specific to EVs.
Actually is it even possible for you to not have any of this anymore? I think this is just a technology issue where the manufacturers try to capitalize on everything including the air inside of it if they could.
Ah yes electric cars weren’t good in the 1920s therefore can’t be good in the era of “stop using fossil fuels or go extinct”
But really, 100 miles on a charge was probably a pretty big deal in 1910
Yeah I’d say that sounds pretty great tbh. I had no idea the range was that useable way back in 1910….
Imagine if we would have continued to improve that technology for 100 years, instead of abandoning it for the ICE
Yeah exactly I am very angry about this. Not happy about it at all. Very bad no good. ☹️
We might have had shipstones by this point.
A model T didn’t beat those numbers by much, and in 1910 you had to start them with a crank which gave a nice element of danger to the whole thing.
Would have been cool to see 100+ years of improvements in electric cars instead of gas cars.
You have to be awfully enamored with your personal narrative to take that as the moral.
Before I noticed what community this was in, I didn’t even realize this was a jab at electric cars. I though the poster was talking about how abandoning electric cars would be the mistake we shouldn’t repeat.
That would be a more legitimate moral to take from it.
