have been around a lot longer than today’s Tesla or even the General Motors EV1 of the late 1990s. In fact, electric cars appeared long before the internal-combustion sort, and dreamers have never stopped trying to make them work both on the road and as a business proposition. A lack of historical perspective sometimes leads to misunderstandings of how things came to be as they are now, so let’s take the long view of the road that got us here.
EVC’s battery supplier became what we know today as Exide. Its manufacturing partner, Pope , took the technology and applied a name from its thriving bicycle business, Columbia, to a run of cars for public sale. Columbia [bottom right] reached the 1000-units-built milestone well before those visionary mass-manufacturers in Detroit, Ransom Olds and Henry Ford, got up to speed.Electric cars proved their mettle in early motorsports.
And then there’s Studebaker, which had built wagons and carriages in the 19th century but entered the 20th as an electric-car manufacturer. That’s Thomas Edison aboard his own 1902 Studebaker Electric in the left photo. Edison and his camping buddy Henry Ford also tried their hand at an electric car and built at least one prototype before both decided that the gasoline engine had a more promising future.
What Henney didn’t have was a good distribution, sales, and dealer system. It built about 100 chassis, but only 47 completed cars were sold. The promoted price was $3600 but it appears that was a profitless target. Sales mostly went to utility-company fleets. A handful survive in collections today.General Motors kept experimenting with electric cars, and this 1966 Electrovair II was one result.
Four LRVs were built at a cost of $38 million, an overrun of 100 percent on the original $19 million projection. Driven nine times , it was the most exotic “car” ever. First deployed on the Apollo 15 mission in 1971 , the LRV used non-rechargeable silver-zinc potassium hydroxide batteries with a stated capacity of 121 amp-hours. Steering at both axles also was by electric motor drawing on the same batteries.
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