Porsche Produces Electric Vehicle

Ferdinand Porsche’s First Vehicle was an Electric Car

When thinking of sports cars today, a person who knows something about cars would inevitably think of a Porsche. The compact beauty, the sleek lines, the power, control, not to mention that the car just looks like its moving even when it is sitting still. These have been truisms of Porsche from its very beginnings. What you may not have known is that Ferdinand Porsche, in order to get that Porsche feeling at the very beginning of his career, made electric cars. Yes. The Porsche of the 1890s was an electric vehicle.

Why electric? Most likely it was because…

in the 1890s there were three propulsion systems playing out in the marketplace, electric, steam and the internal combustion engines, and of these the most advanced and stable platform was electric. Electric cars were the speed demons of the time. On April 29, 1899 the Belgian, Camille Jenatzy in a vehicle called the “Jamais Contente” set the first land speed record of 66 mph in a bullet shaped vehicle powered by two, 12 volt motors. [1]

Ferdinand Porsche knew electric motors best having started his career making electric engines at Bela Egger. Ludwig Lohner the head of K & K Royal Coach Company convinced him to move his expertise to his new venture. The first Lohner-Porsche vehicle had electric motors that were mounted inside the front wheel hubs thereby eliminating the need for a shaft or chains to transfer energy to the wheels. Something that is done again today in General Motors Corporation’s (GM) advanced hydrogen platform. The car became the main attraction at the 1900 World’s Fair, with its 90 volt batteries and a top speed of 31 miles per hour (mph), a blistering speed for a production car in those days. It also could operate for three hours without stopping, a great advantage over the dominant mode of transportation of the day, the horse. [2] Porsche’s second car was a series hybrid.

The First Fight for Market Dominance

The electric car of that period put the internal combustion engine to shame. According to , Mary Bellis, author of the About.com article, Inventors, The History of Electric Vehicles, The Early Years – Electric Cars (1890 – 1930) “Electric vehicles had many advantages over their competitors in the early 1900s. They did not have the vibration, smell, and noise associated with gasoline cars. Changing gears on gasoline cars was the most difficult part of driving, while electric vehicles did not require gear changes. While steam-powered cars also had no gear shifting, they suffered from long start-up times of up to 45 minutes on cold mornings. The steam cars had less range before needing water than an electric’s range on a single charge. The only good roads of the period were in town, causing most travel to be local commuting, a perfect situation for electric vehicles, since their range was limited. The electric vehicle was the preferred choice of many because it did not require the manual effort to start, as with the hand crank on gasoline vehicles, and there was no wrestling with a gear shifter.” [3]

The First Automobiles as we Know them Were Electric

“Vehicles with electrical engines were … invented. Between 1832 and 1839 (the exact year is uncertain), Robert Anderson of Scotland invented the first electric carriage.” [6] In my research I could not find how the electricity was derived for Robert Anderson’s vehicle or how it was directed to the motors. It predates the more successful electric road vehicles that were invented by both American Thomas Davenport and Scotsmen Robert Davidson around 1842, which were the first to use non-rechargeable electric cells, (Informative Graphics Corporation) and the invention of the rechargeable electric battery by Frenchmen Gaston Plante in 1865. [7]

In 1880 Emile Alphonse Faure improves on Plante’s rechargeable with a paste of lead powder and sulfuric acid, making the lead-acid battery more reliable, other refinements made the same year improve the battery even more. [8] In 1885, “The Chicago Times-Herald sponsored a race in which one of the cars was the Electrobat II built by Henry Morris and Pedro Salom. It was powered by two 1-1/2 horsepower motors mounted on the front axle and had a range of 25 miles at 20 mph.” [1] By 1886 England had an electric-powered taxicab company. More improvements were made. In 1890 William Morrison built an electric vehicle in Des Moines, Iowa that could travel for 13 hours at 14 mph on a 10 hour charge (Electric Vehicle Timeline). In 1897 the London Electric Cab Company began regular service using electric vehicles designed by Walter Bersey. In 1897 Pope Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut built around 500 electric cars over a two-year period. In 1898 the Electric Carriage and Wagon Company, started by engineers Henry Morris and Pedro Salom, had a fleet of twelve sturdy and stylish electric cabs on the streets of New York.(Hybrid Car History, Hybridcars.com)

By the year 1899 there was a feeling that electric vehicles were set for a boom, and they were: “In 1899 and 1900, electrics outsold all other type of cars…” [10] in the United State. The giddiness over electric vehicles and their future could have not been stronger. That year the marketplace shifted and the owners of Pope Manufacturing Company felt that a monopoly on cab services using electric vehicles was possible. They merged with Henry Morris and Pedro Salom’s Electric Carriage and Wagon Company and Isaac L. Rice’s Electric Storage Battery Company of Philadelphia. The new venture was named the Electric Vehicle Company and had assets of $200 million. [9]

1899 Camille Jenatzy’s “Jamais Contente” set the first land speed record of 66 mph

On April 29, 1899 a Belgium named Camille Jenatzy posted a recorded speed 66 miles per hour, nothing before had gone so fast. Then the following year the BGS Company produce an electric car that traveled 180 miles on a single charge and once again electric cars were at the top, selling more cars than any other type. The Electric Vehicle Company made plans to run electric taxi services, in major cities across the country and in 1904 puts in orders for 2000 taxicabs, trucks, and buses. That same year Walter Baker raced his Baker Torpedo, an advanced car that weighed 3,100 lbs, seated two and featured the world’s first safety belts, to an unprecedented 104 mph at Daytona. [14] However, in “… 1907 [we] saw both the Electric Vehicle Company and the Pope Manufacturing Company go into receivership …”

The sudden demand for gasoline creates shortages of this formerly useless product, gasoline. Between 1907 and 1912 electric vehicles saw a resurgence. In 1907 Detroit Electric was born. The company focused on private ownership of electric vehicles that meet all of the transportation needs of ordinary people for the time. Its quality products and its price made it the best known and longest-lived electric car manufacturer in the U.S. selling over 14,000 cars before it closed its doors in 1929. [2]

“Eventually twenty different U.S. car companies would produce electrics; and in the peak of popularity, 1912, nearly 35,000 were operating on American roads.” [12]

Old Engraving depicting the 1771 crash of Nicolas Joseph Cugnot’s steam-powered car into a stone wall. Courtesy of About.com

In Conclusion

History when it is written about war typically belongs to the victors. This is also true with industrial history. Since to this day the dominant form of propulsion has become the internal combustion engine, historians tend to look back at the history of independent transportation through those eyes. The date often given to the invention of the automobile is 1886. That is when on January 29, 1886, Karl Benz received the first patent for a gas-fueled car, it was a three wheeled vehicle, and on March 8, of that same year Gottlieb Daimler converted a stagecoach with an engine of his own design, thereby making the world’s first four-wheeled ICE automobile. However, in actuality when you bring in the other forms of independent non-track and non-animal transportation you find that the there were multiple players in automobiles in the very beginning. Steam may have been the first automobile per se, however, its heaviness didn’t lead to the Stanley Steamer, it lead to the railroads, steel track could handle the weight. Electric Vehicles truly were the first vehicle that we think of as cars in the way we think of a car today and not the internal combustion engine vehicles of Benz and Daimler.

1. Electric Vehicle Timeline, Newton Public School System, 2003 http://www.newton.mec.edu/brown/te/ALTERNATIVE_FUEL/TIMELINE/timeline.html
2. De La Rive Box, Rob, The Complete Encyclopedia of Antique Cars: Sport and Passenger Cars 1886-1940, (Netherlands, Rebo International b.v. 1998)
3. Bellis, Mary, Inventors, The History of Electric Vehicles, The Early Years – Electric Cars (1890 – 1930), About.com2
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarselectrica.htm
4. Bellis, Mary., Inventors, The History of the Automobile, The Internal Combustion Engine and Early Gas-Powered Cars, About.com
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarsgasa.htm
5. Bellis, Mary, Inventors, The history of the Automobile, Early Steam Powered Cars, About.com
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aacarssteama.htm
6. Shocking Developments, Informative Graphics Corporation, 2004
http://www.innerauto.com/innerauto/text/hist04.html
7. Ecars: Early Years
http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/212_fall2003.web.dir/Neitzer_Hosford/Cars.htm

8. Battery History, Europulse.com, TNI Ltd.
http://www.europulse.com/battery_history/battery_history.htm
9. Hybrid Car History, Hybridcars.com, 2003
http://www.hybridcars.com/history.html
10. Bottorff, William W., What Was The First Car? (Accessed April 29, 2004)
http://www.ausbcomp.com/~bbott/cars/carhist.htm
11. Hybrid Car History, Hybridcars.com, 2003 (Accessed May 1, 2004)
http://www.hybridcars.com/history.html
12. Shocking Developments, Innerauto.com (Accessed May 1, 2004)
http://www.innerauto.com/innerauto/text/hist04.html
13. B.G.S. La societe de la voiture Bouquet, Garcin et Schivre of 12 Ave de Madrid, Neuilly, France produced electric cars from 1899 to 1906. They produced a range of vehicles from dogcarts and phaetons to small buses and other commercial vehicles. One of their cars established a one-charge range record of 262 km (about 180 miles) in 1899. The company produced their own batteries for use in the vehicles. Some EV History, Econogics.com, 2003 http://www.econogics.com/ev/evhiste.htm
14. World Electric Land Speed Records, Speedace,com (Accessed May 1, 2004)
http://www.speedace.info/baker_torpedo.htm
15. Kirsch, David A., The Electric Vehicle and the Burden of History, (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. 2000). p214