Fiat (Fabbrica Italiana di Automobili Torino, or the Italian Car Factory of Turin) was founded on July 11, 1899, by Giovanni Agnelli, and quickly established itself in almost every automotive sector. Its specialty in small cars began in the 1930s, and continues today. The company has owned Ferrari and Lancia since 1969, Alfa Romeo since […]
As the fifties drew to a close another company was preparing to launch an electric car on to the American market. Bankrolled by an ambitious would-be motor magnet, the Henney Kilowatt had a powertrain built by a vacuum cleaner company that was installed in the body of a Renault Dauphine. Quite why the Henney Motor
The French, too, were revisiting the electric car after the Second World War. The Symetric (also known as the Arbel or Symmetric-Paris) was a relatively sophisticated four-wheel drive hybrid design, which harked back to the country’s glory days of the Krieger automobile. Lightweight, thanks to plastic bodywork, the car used a 4-cylinder gasoline engine to
After the Second World War, Japan was in ruins. With the exception of Kyoto, all the large cities and towns were severely damaged. To the casual observer Tokyo looked indistinguishable from Hiroshima or Nagasaki – just mile upon mile of bombed and burnt-out buildings. The transport infrastructure and big factories had ceased to exist. Allied
Of electric cars in America there was virtually nothing. However, on the other side of the Atlantic, the British had discovered a new use for electric vehicles: household deliveries. Battery-powered vans and light trucks often had a greater payload capacity than their internal combustion-engined rivals and were used to ferry milk, eggs, bread and coal
If the electric car was doomed to failure 100 years ago, what of its commercial equivalent? Initially, electric trucks did well in the market. Fleet managers preferred them over unreliable and noisy gasoline rivals and, to start with, their modest pace was acceptable to an industry where horse traction had been the norm. By 1905,
By the 1920s, virtually every electric car manufacturer had gone out of business or thrown in the towel and moved on to making gasoline-powered cars. In the space of just two decades the electric car had gone from a technology that, in the words of Electrical World magazine, ‘has no rival’ to being utterly redundant.
The Milburn Wagon Company knew a thing or two about large-scale production. George Milburn was born in Alston, Cumbria, in 1820. He emigrated to Canada before moving across the border to the United States of America in 1835. A successful businessman who owned hotels and property, George started the Milburn Wagon Company to manufacturer farm
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