After the Pandemic of Covid-19, the war in Ukraine today reveals the harshness of the transformations which await societies accustomed to material abundance. Consumers are reached in the face of increasing energy or food prices, and governments are reduced to expedients which often emphasize the ecological problem and increase the cost of future adaptations. In such circumstances, the appeal to individual efforts is as omnipresent as it is poorly placed. A historical example gives new proof of this: that of the emergence of the first cause of emission of greenhouse gas and urban pollution, the engine exploding.
As Josef Taalbi and Hana Nielsen recall in a recent article (The Role of Energy Infrastructure in Shaping Early Adoption of Electric and Gasoline Cars “, Nature Energy, October 7, 2021), the electric motor has been developed parallel to the engine Exploding, at the extreme end of the 19th e century, to compete and replace a steam engine considered dangerous for individual use. After the invention of the rechargeable battery with lead by Gaston planted, in 1859, and its successive improvements, electric vehicles had the attraction of modernity (in 1937, again, Raoul Dufy could without ridiculous painting the electricity for the company Parisian electricity distribution). Between 1881 and 1900, the new models multiplied in the main advanced countries. The automotive speed record is also still established in 1899, at 108 km/h, by an electric vehicle, the famous never-contained. Industrial production is struggling to choose initially between electrical and explosion engines. In 1900, almost twice as much electric cars were produced as petrol cars and, in 1905, half of the world’s fleet was electric.
the key to competition
We usually explain the ascendant taken by the engine exploding around 1910 by the drop in oil prices and the improvement of engines and then serial production of the famous Ford T from 1913. Nevertheless, the electric car was appreciated for its reliability, its cleanliness, its silence and its ease of driving, and its price remained very close to that of explosion cars. In reality, it is the insufficiency of the distribution network, especially in the United States (which become the main world producer and innovative when the Great War occurs), which plays the main role. The electric car is well suited to cities, where recharging is easy. It is adopted by positions from different countries, including France, or by taxi networks. But electrifying the vast American rural areas is not profitable before the 1920s, too late to re -turn electric motors.
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