Evolution of “Green” Cars
The electric car goes back a lot further than you’d think. Way back in the 1830s, there were electric cars whizzing about operating on designs from at least three different people – except, of course, they weren’t exactly whizzing. The biggest competition they faced was from the well-established horse and the rapidly-escalating railroad. The idea of a personal vehicle powered by a motor was a seismic shift and it had to wait until the development of a power unit small enough to do the job. By the early 20th century, the various car propulsion systems that grew up in the 19th century were eclipsed by the internal combustion engine. We think of this as a foregone conclusion, but it wasn’t – early internal combustion engines had just one distinct advantage, which was that they didn’t produce manure, which was a huge problem in 19th century cities. In the 19th century, cities were crowded with horse manure and people were employed to sweep paths through it for the wealthy. With trams and cars, it vanished forever.
Fast forward a century and the big problem in a major city isn’t lying on the floor. It’s in the air.
The gasoline engine is responsible for the smog that blankets LA and Chicago, New York and Saint Louis. And with gas prices rising, supplies dwindling and scientific experts telling us that we should be working to leave what’s in the ground where it is, those early electric cars are looking less like dead ends and more like avenues for exploration.
Of course, when you have a technology that works, the instinct is always to improve it, not to switch: as Henry Ford pointed out, “If I’d asked people what they wanted they would have asked for a faster horse.” It’s the same story with green cars: early versions were often attempts to wring more power from a smaller unit, or to re-purpose technologies like superchargers to allow for smaller engine sizes and thus lower fuel consumption. These efforts have met with huge success: The 1983 Chevrolet Malibu had a 3.8-liter engine that gave 110 horsepower. The 2005 model’s 2.2 liter engine gave 144 horsepower. In 2011, a2/4 liter motor was generating 169hp in the same vehicle.
Another solution is the hybrid car. Hybrid cars date from 1901, when the first was designed by the Porsche company. If you think about it, a car engine does several distinct jobs: it accelerates, keeps you cruising at a steady speed, idles and drives you slowly through built-up areas. Pulling out onto the freeway might take up all 2.2 liters for a couple seconds, but dawdling down a downtown street doesn’t. Hybrid cars take advantage of this by running a dual power system – an electric motor drives you slowly and the powerful gas engine kicks in when torque is needed. Hybrid cars use significantly less fuel: the Prius runs about 50 miles to the US gallon, compared with 31 for the Ford Focus.
So we can realistically slash fuel consumption drastically and increase performance at the same time. Unfortunately we’re then into the difference between a qualitative and a quantitative change. If the fire department has extinguished most of the flames and your house is only a little bit on fire, most would say you still have a problem. If our consumption of fossil fuels falls but we’re still dependent on them, all we’ve really done is bail out a sinking ship; delaying the inevitable. There has to be a better way.
Purely electrical cars could cut cars loose from fossil fuels altogether by using solar to charge cells. At the end of the 20th century electric cars were slow, underpowered, heavy and there was nowhere to recharge them. Fifteen years on, though, Elon Musk’s Tesla company has produced a sports car that will cover 244 miles on a single charge and puts out 248hp. While both the Tesla sportster and the Lotus Elise on which its bodywork is substantially modeled are well outside the range of most drivers’ wallets, it’s the ‘Superchargers’ – a distributed network of charge points, small now but growing – that’s the real breakthrough. Tesla might not be the future, and for a long time there will probably be a ‘hybrid future’ – gas, hybrid and pure electric cars existing side by side. But non-gas cars are the future.