The History of The Electric Car

The History of The Electric Car is longer than you might think without digging into it. See the electric car is as old as man made electricity is. Back at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries, nearly all cars were electric. This was because the internal combustion engine had motor had not developed to the point which it would be reliable for for a prime mover for transportation just yet.

Nikola Tesla the man who is largely the electric grid which we know of today, built one of the first electric cars. In fact it was claimed to be powered by radiant energy which exists in the galaxy. I will not go into how he did that and will leave it up to the reader to research such, however if anyone has a question about it I will gladly provide you with links to the information if you would just leave me a comment in the comments section asking for such.

But beyond the fact that he was one of the first designers/developers to delve into the area of electric cars, your car runs today thanks to one of his patents-- the electronic distributor. You see all of the distributors in your cars rely on AC and not DC-- (a pulsating dc wave form to be exact) as the readers of this blog know Tesla was the inventor of AC electricity. AC was necessary to take advantage of another one of Tela's patents-- the ignition coil for the internal combustion engine.

But beyond Tesla's allegedly cosmic powered car, all cars had to offer was an electric car which utilized lead-acid batteries. The first drawback of lead-acid batteries was their weight. Of course this creates yet another draw back of lead-acid batteries-- lead acid batteries have a terrible weight to power ratio. Lithium-ion batteries of today offer a far better energy density than lead-acid batteries have.

So we have a technology, that of electric cars, which spans back at least 100 years. I do not know about you, but I would truly love to see one of these early electric cars. So battery technology had to keep up with the internal combustion engine after it came along. We are right now at the point where this has happened. Yes I said it here-- we now have the technology to be able to produce not only an electric car, but we now have the technology to produce one that will have much more than a 30 mile range!