See Car-Go

Picture a time when at least a third of all cars on the road are electric and when the largest car manufacturer in the United States makes only all-electric vehicles. Are you picturing that time? Yes, those were the days! “Were”? Yup, were. Cars were invented in the 1880s, and by the turn of the century, 34% of the vehicles in our biggest cities were electric (half were steam-powered); the largest U.S. automaker was the Electric Vehicle Company (E.V.C.). E.V.C. only rented their cars out, however, because they thought folks really didn’t have the sophistication to repair them. But for most purposes, given the limited infrastructure, the battery charge on one of these puppies took you pretty much anywhere you might want (or be able) to go.

Electric cars might have dominated the marketplace thereafter had E.V.C. not tripped itself: “[W]hen a series of shady business dealings [and spotty performance] drove the New York-based company into bankruptcy, it took electric cars down with it. Investors, soured by their experience with the E.V.C., swore they’d never put money into the industry again, and in the lull in electric-car development that followed, gasoline-car companies improved their technology and made their vehicles cheaper. Over the next 20 years, Americans formed a new idea of what a car was. And from that point on, right up to today, it was hard to get them to try anything else.” New York Times, October 2^nd.

They say that automobiles invented suburbs, residential hubs that were just too far away and too spread out to have existed without that personal form of transportation. If gas prices continue to soar, and we don’t find alternative viable energy forms, we might just find ourselves being pushed back to the cities where the jobs tend to be centered.

We crossed the billion car mark on this planet back in 2010, and there’s no sign of that trend abating anytime soon. There are lot of reasons why electric motors were so much more important in the early days of cars besides the cheap power and the dominance of E.V.C. An electric motor didn’t need gears or difficult starting mechanisms; they were easy to learn to use and easier to drive. Gasoline engines were complex, mixing fuel and air to get controlled explosions to push pistons, etc. Gears were needed to move from a standstill to cruising speed on an open road. You also had to learn to shift, and the clutch was a necessary addition to keep from ripping the gears out of the box.

Had General Electric, rich with the revenues from Edison’s myriad patents, drilled more into the car business, there is little doubt that we would be driving mostly electric cars today. Their huge capital resources pushed gas-powered refrigerators out the door pretty quickly, and electricity was the household standard for most appliances thereafter. But apparently, they were making plenty of money everywhere else. They didn’t need to get into making cars and layering in another set of expensive infrastructure to make them more useful. The author of the NY Times piece quoted above – Maggie Koerth-Baker – also likes author and Professor David Kirsch’s (U. of Md.) analysis that we like infrastructure that we can take for granted, that’s basically “invisible.” But when we have to install that infrastructure ourselves – like adding an electrical charging station to our home garage – it’s an added inconvenience when all we really wanted is a “car.” It becomes way too visible and intrusive.

The U.S. census provides a number of filling stations that we had back in 2007 – 128,887. Just think of the hundreds of billions of dollars we have invested in those monsters. Think of the oil wells, the drilling equipment, the tankers (sea and land) needed to move fossil fuels around, the financial system used to finance it all… and you can see how tough it would be to replace this massive commitment with a technology that uses very little of this pile o’ stuff. There are a whole lot of folks, with a whole lot of jobs and a huge pile of wealth, who really don’t want to change that system anytime soon. They don’t relish the obsolescence of all that invested capital.

Not that consumers are diving into all-electric-all-the-time either. Electric car companies are having a rough time, facing limited production capacity and increasing costs and complications to find a viable market. Range is a big deal, and even if you can get 125-250 miles on a charge, you have to stop for about an hour (depending on the car) or more to recharge. Not great for those long road trips, and you have to time the trips around the few charging stations available. How about a battery swap? Possible but far from an attractive or easy choice.

Hybrid car makers are having a bit of an easier time, but the transition from gasoline to electric might just benefit from an intervening technology with a flare of the familiar about it: “You can change the technology. You can change the infrastructure and culture. And sometimes, you have to change both, easing people into accepting a new tool by making it look and feel like the old one you want to replace. It’s this, Kirsch says, that will enable electric cars to finally succeed. The trick is to not expect people to jump straight from all-gasoline to all-electric. What’s necessary is a transitional step that makes electric cars operate more like the cars we’re used to driving.

“Kirsch thinks hybrids will ultimately help us make that jump. You can use a hybrid without building a separate infrastructure. You don’t need to learn new habits of driving and maintenance. Hybrids are even designed to mimic the feel of a gas engine. If you’ve ever ridden in a Prius, you may have noticed that it creeps forward when you take your foot off the brake. There’s no technological reason it should do that; engineers just added the feature for the sake of familiarity.” NY Times. Hey, those pure electrics are so silent they sneak up on people, who don’t know that such cars are there… so they have little recordings of engine noise that mimic a gas engine… a sound option the driver cannot turn off!

In the end, despite the setbacks and the struggle of the plug-ins to find a U.S. market, we are making that transition one way or the other. It may be slow. It might not please those seeking shorter-term solutions to greenhouse emissions, but it is happening.

I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes living at the beginning of a transition obscures the magnitude of the inevitable transformation of the technological basics of our day-to-day world.