Description of car models from around the world and their history.
Despite Thomas Edison’s exhortations to a young Henry Ford that internal combustion was ‘the thing’, the brilliant inventor hadn’t given up on the idea of the electric car. His first effort, built in 1895, was a single-seat three-wheeler – two at the front and one at the back – powered by two electric motors that […]
Several manufacturers followed Lohner’s lead by developing their own hybrid drive systems. The Krieger Hybrid, made by the Paris Electric Car Company in 1903, was almost identical to Porsche’s car. More interesting was the Auto-Mixte, which was made in Belgium from 1906 and used a 24bhp combustion engine, which drove a dynamo via a magnetic
Manufacturers of electric vehicles were already well aware of the drawbacks imposed by storage batteries and work was going on both sides of the Atlantic to find a way of solving the biggest problem of them all: how to extend the range-to-empty. At the World Exhibition in Paris, in 1900, k.u.k. Hofwagenfabrik Ludwig Lohner &
Just as a disillusioned Pope was contemplating bankruptcy, another American company, the Baker Motor Vehicle Company, in Cleveland, Ohio, was claiming to be the world’s biggest manufacturer of electric cars. Founded by Walter C. Baker in 1899, with money from two businessmen who had made their fortunes selling sewing machines, the first Baker Runabout was
It was a very different story in America, where electric cars kept pace with the internal combustion competition until Ford’s game-changing Model T arrived. Why was this? The greater urbanization of American cities made getting about in an electric car far easier and the electric car industry made a more determined effort to create a
The decade from 1900 to 1910 represented the Golden Age of electric cars. In the first year of the new century, nearly 40 per cent of the cars sold in the United States, the world’s largest market, were electric. Gasoline-powered cars accounted for just 22 per cent. Although development of the internal combustion engine was
The EVC wasn’t slow to put its grand plan into effect. Hartford was soon working on orders for thousands of electric vehicles and the company was expanding abroad. To satisfy demand in Paris, the EVC built a charging station at 54 Avenue Montaigne, in the centre of the city, and acquired land for a second
The EVC continued its remorseless policy of consolidation. Before the end of the year the Riker Electric Motor Vehicle Company, of New Jersey, had been bought out. Andrew Lawrence Riker had lashed together his first electric car by cannibalizing two Remington bicycle frames in 1894 with a metal cradle and a motor. Two years later,
The early success of electric cabs in America brought Morris and Salom’s invention to the attention of Isaac Leopold Rice, president of the Electric Storage Battery Company, of Philadelphia. Rice, a brilliant lawyer who had made his name saving ailing railroad companies from financial ruin, had snapped up many of the most promising patents on
Walter Bersey, a precocious 20-year-old who had designed his own dry battery, was the first businessman to introduce a ‘self-propelled’ vehicle for hire on the streets of London. His early cabs resembled horseless carriages with twin 3.5bhp Lundell-type motors, a two-speed gearbox (with clutch) and chain final drive. They were capable of a steady 9mph