Thomas Edison and Electric Cars

What if you had Edison or Tesla invent a better battery? That solves a lot of the problem about the constraints of the range of the electric car. I would imagine Edison has substantial reason to do so, because a better battery make direct current more feasible.

Even with the EV-1 that GM rolled out in the late 90's required hours of recharge time, so I think that night-time recharge at the owner's home is probably going to be the way these cars are recharged.

Even if this happens, it seems to me that a battery - centric engine is liable to be harder to maintain and more expensive to maintain than a gasoline one. I may be wrong: a good battery system has the potential to reduce the number of moving parts in the car itself. I wonder if you could even see something like the logistical dynamics of inkjet printers: most of the mechanics of the printer are really in the nozzles of the cartridge. This solves the problem that they would degrade over time but also means that John Q. Consumer has to keep buying more of them on a regular basis. I'm not mechanically savvy enough to figure it out, but if you could get the battery to perform the same basic function, then you have the same effect. Indeed, car companies would love this because not only do they get to sell you a high cost durable good, they get to keep selling you a capital intensive replacement part.

Without all those moving parts, your going to end up really reducing how much stuff you'll need to maintain a car. Since that is a major revenue producer for the car companies, the fact that the car company and the power company are owned by the same corporate entity is going to be a plus.

When did oil become the primary fuel for ocean going ships, btw? Is there any benefit to having oil / coal power an electrical generator which in turn powers a ship's motor? I know disel subs work like that, but only because of the exhaust. I'm wondering if there might be a gain in response time: electric cars today usually have terrific acceleration because the application of speed is nearly instantaneous. There's still probably some inertia involved in turning a Dreadnought's screws, but I wonder if there's some room for improvement. I'd have to imagine it depends on the gain in speed / acceleration (relative to the need to move through the water and the effect of the intertia on the ship itself) and the increased amount of space and the efficiency of the power transfer.

Oil became the primary fuel prior to WWI. The reason that the switch was made from coal to oil is because you get twice as much energy yield from oil as you do from a comparable amount of coal.

I think the tipping point for both of these schemes hinges on the efficiencies of the batteries involved.

With the technology available is it possible to produce a battery that could get between 30 and 60 miles of travel off a battery? Is it reasonable that either Telsa or Edison could invent that kind of thing?
 
Getting back to the original topic, the major drawback to electric cars at about the time of World War I was existing battery technology. At that time, the options for storage batteries were pretty much limited to lead/acid batteries--period. There were no deep-draw batteries that are often used on light duty electric vehicles today (e.g., golf carts). Also, domestic electric service was nowhere near what it is today: most homes had no more than a 60 amp feed from the street (today, 200 amps is pretty common), so that overnight recharging was pretty much a given: it wouldn't have been feasible to draw power for much of anything else while recharging a bank of fifteen or so six volt batteries, and at the time, 10 amp circuits were pretty much the norm for domestic use (and I believe there were even 5 amp circuits in some instances). Oh, and don't forget that domestic circuits were protected by fuses in those days, too.

Also, the DC traction-type motors used weren't very efficient: they were heavy (lots of cast iron) and the bearings weren't all that good, for example. And while there was a lot of wood in the construction of automobiles of all sorts in those days, the bodies were still fairly heavy.

Today, a 50 amp/240 volt circuit could be provided fairly easily to a garage, with a transformer to step it down to perhaps 120 volts locally and a rectifier to convert AC to DC--with both electric items in one relatively small package. Today's batteries can be charged more rapidly and are capable of deeper drawdown, and cars can be made of more lightweight materials.

As a footnote, I've seen a World War I vintage Detroit Electric in operation, powered by a bank of golf cart batteries (6 volt, I believe, with a total of 15 connected in series): what wears down the batteries are the inefficiencies of the motor and the weight/mechanical inefficiencies of the vehicle. Charging with modern electric service is the least of the problems.
 
How about an improved fuel cell? I think those were around by 1890.


Even if gasoline engines aren't developed, steam cars are still around and electrics suck for long distance driving. So electric is predominant early on, starts losing to steam when roads get better allowing inter-city travel, and gets beat silly when steam cars eliminate the steam-up time. The only thing that would keep electric competitive is if people come to totally rely on trains for long-distance travel. Steam cars and trucks will be what is used in the country.


Apart from Edison, for making electric supreme, i like the idea someone on here suggested a while back about Thomas Davenport developing a generator. Then electric cars could have been made by the 1850s-1860s, and that gives 40 years for development before gasoline cars come along.
 
Would having virtually every street equipped with overhead cables actually work?
Didn't (don't?) most cities have overhead lines now on most streets? For phone & such? How hard would it have been to alter them to power "trolleycars" (which they wouldn't be called TTL, naturally:p)?
 
If you could get electric cars to take power from overhead lines, like electric trams etc., it might work.

You woud need a lot more lines, otherwise the cars would be restricted to tram routes.

(I beleive electric trams were around since the 1880s, from reading Wikipedia...)
I've been reading up on some related stuff, it seems that for quite a while, at least until 1899ish, NYC didn't allow overhead lines for trolleys, they were all battery powered.

I also seem to remember that there's some point in the early development of the car where hybrid engine proliferated until [some development that I can't quite recall] improved the efficiency of gasoline engines to the point at which it'd didn't make economic sense to use another kind of fuel input.
Hybrids didn't exactly proliferate. Pieper, a Belgian firm, made some. Woods had the Dual-Power (the Interurban was not a hybrid) , Lohner-Porsche had the Mixte, the Owens Magnetic was sort of a hybrid and was in production until 1921, and there were others. None were made in large numbers. Like you said, gasoline and gasoline engines declined in cost and batteries stayed expensive.
 
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