ELECTRIC

Electric vehicles are not actually new at all.  In fact, they predate internal-combustion-powered vehicles by about 50 years!   In the 1930s, Robert Anderson built a motorized carriage in Scotland using galvanic cell batteries.  These early batteries could not be recharged, however, so Anderson’s carriage was more of a parlor trick than a mode of transportation.  Rechargeable batteries were conceived in 1859, making the prospects for an electrical vehicle much more palatable.  In 1888, William Morrison, a Scottish chemist living in Des Moines, Iowa, drove a 4 HP, front-wheel-drive electric vehicle in a parade in Des Moines.  Morrison’s self-propelled carriage had 24 battery cells that needed recharging every 50 miles, but could propel the vehicle to an impressive 20 miles per hour.  By the early 1900s, electric vehicles represented a third of all vehicles on the road.  However, assembly-line affordability, better roads, and cheap oil led to a decline of electric vehicles until they all but disappeared by 1935.  Since 2010, however, electric vehicles have experienced an unprecedented resurgence.  Technology has improved significantly and today’s electric vehicles offer not only less emissions, but excellent performance (including instantaneous torque) and less expensive and less frequent maintenance requirements.