Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Electric Cars

Episode Date: August 12, 2021

There is an old saying that everything old is new again. This is certainly true with electric cars. The recent surge in popularity of electric vehicles is technically a resurgence, because believe it or not, there was a time when electric cars were more popular than cars with internal combustion engines. Learn more about electric cars, their history, future, as well as their benefits and drawbacks, on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's an old saying that everything old is new again, and this is certainly true with electric cars. The recent surge in popularity of electric vehicles is technically a resurgence, because believe it or not, there was a time over a century ago when electric cars were more popular than cars with internal combustion engines. Learn more about electric cars, their history, future, as well as their benefits and drawbacks on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thurline podcast from NPR.

This episode is sponsored by audible.com. My audiobook recommendation today is Car Wars, the rise, fall, and resurgence of the electric car by John Fialca. The resurgence of the electric car in modern life is a tale of adventurers who bucked the complete dominance of a fossil-fueled car to seek something cleaner, simpler, and cheaper. Award-winning former Wall Street Journal reporter John Fialca documents the early days of the electric car, from the MIT-Caltech race between prototypes in the summer of 1968, to the 1987 victory of the Sunracer in the world's first race featuring solar-powered cars. 30 years later, the electric car has captured the imagination and pocketbooks of American consumers. The electric car has steadily gained traction in the U.S. and around the world. We're watching the start of a trillion-dollar race to see who will dominate one of the biggest commercial upheavals of the 21st century. You can get a free one-month trial to Audible and two free audiobooks by going to audible.com slash everything everywhere

or by clicking on the link in the show notes. Believe it or not, the electric automobile is almost 200 years old. In 1828, a Hungarian priest by the name of Años Jedlick created a simple electric motor and may have created a device that converted it into motion. In 1832, Scottish inventor Robert Anderson created a very simple vehicle, which is basically a carriage, a non-rechargeable electric battery, and a crude electric motor. It didn't go very far and it didn't go very fast, but it was a self-propelled electric vehicle. Electric vehicles were mostly novelties and weren't something that could find practical use.

There was no centralized electrical generation at the time, and there were no wires transmitting electricity. And moreover, every time you use the car, you had to get a brand new battery. It isn't believed that any of these very early vehicles actually ever carried a passenger. Many people in mid-19th century created electric devices which moved, including prototype electric trains. However, the fundamental problem that electric vehicles ran into were poor batteries and very inefficient motors. The first big development came in 1859 by French physicist Gaston Plante, who invented the acid-led battery. This was a breakthrough in that the battery could be recharged over and over. Even though there had been improvements over the years, this is still

basically the same type of battery found in most cars today. In 1881, French inventor Gustave Truv created the first thing that we would probably recognize as an automobile. It was an electrically driven vehicle that could carry a passenger down a public street. Trevi, interestingly enough, also applied his electric motor to a boat, thus creating the world's first outboard motor. In 1882, Englishman Thomas Parker produced a commercial electric vehicle. It wasn't until 1885 that German engineer Carl Benz invented the first internal combustion engine automobile, and the name Benz should ring a bell to anyone who is remotely

familiar with cars. Throughout the 1890s, electric cars were far more. popular than cars with internal combustion engines. Electricity was used for trolleys in many urban areas as well. In 1890, a Belgian rocket-shaped electric car named La Jame Quintante set the land speed record by breaking the 100-kilometer-an-hour barrier and reached a top speed of 105.8 kilometers per hour or 65.8 miles per hour. Ferdin M. Portia, another name you should probably recognize, also created an early

electric car. In the first decade of the 20th century, electric cars were still more popular than gas-driven cars. However, there weren't really a whole lot of cars, period. A survey done at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States found that 40% of automobiles were powered by steam, 38% by electricity, and only 22% by gasoline. As electrification became more common, it proved to be a boon for electric cars. More people had electricity in their homes, which meant that they could charge their vehicles easily. Up until about 1912, electric automobiles had distinct advantages over gasoline power cars.

Electric cars didn't require shifting gears. Electric cars didn't have to be manually started by turning a crank. The infrastructure for electricity was also more widespread at the time than the infrastructure for gasoline. Finally, gasoline power cars were loud and dirty. Most of all, an electric vehicle is vastly more simple than an internal combustion engine. It took years of engineering improvements and new innovations to get the internal combustion engine to a point where it was clearly more practical than an electric motor.

And more on that topic in a bit. However, that did eventually happen. By the time the 1920s rolled around, gasoline-powered cars had taken the lead. The problem was electric vehicles were severely limited in the amount of energy they could carry. The batteries' limited range meant they could only be used in cities. With improved roads, more people wanted to travel longer. distances, and they wanted to travel faster. Electric vehicles had a fundamental hurdle that they simply couldn't overcome.

Acid-led batteries were very heavy and didn't have enough charge to operate a vehicle at high speeds or long distances. Gasoline-powered, internal combustion engine automobiles became so dominant that electric cars all but disappeared. There was still some fringe interest in electric cars in the last few decades of the 20th century, and there were improvements in battery technology, but it wasn't enough to come close to making electric vehicle competitive with gasoline vehicles. Electric vehicles found a very niche market as golf carts and for use indoors where you didn't

want to be admitting exhaust. So what happened? What changed that eventually made electric vehicles a viable option to compete with internal combustion engine cars? In a nutshell, batteries changed. Electric motors had improved throughout the 20th century, becoming ever more efficient, but they were mostly used for industrial purposes. That wasn't the change.

In the 1990s, General Motors produced an electric car called the EV-1. It had a range of 80 miles, and it took 7 seconds to hit 50 miles per hour. The batteries were nickel-metal hydride. Within a decade of the EV-1, the range, speed, and acceleration of electric cars almost tripled. In particular, it was due to the development of lithium batteries, particularly lithium-ion batteries. Today, lithium-ion batteries are in everything, including the device you're probably using to listen to this podcast right now. Lithium is the third lightest element on the periodic table. Compare that to lead, which is extremely heavy. If you've ever had to pick up a car battery, you know just how

heavy they are. Lithium iam batteries also have a very high energy density, high enough that they were able to change the equation and make electric vehicles once again viable. Just before, I mentioned that electric vehicles were vastly more simple than internal combustion engines, and they are. So much of what you have come to expect in owning a car just goes away with electric cars. An electric car is basically a battery and a motor. That's it. I'm grossly oversimplifying it, of course, but those are the two fundamental things that make the car go. Consider all of the stuff in a traditional car that is not in an electric car. For starters, you never need to change the oil, because there is no oil. There are no pistons that need lubrication, hence there is also no

oil filter. There's no radiator because you aren't producing so much heat, so there's no radiator fluid, no fan, no belts, and no hoses. Electric cars don't have gears, so you don't need transmission fluid, and nothing will ever go wrong with your transmission. There are no spark plugs, there's no air filter, there's no alternator, no muffler, no catalytic converter, and no tailpipe. Internal combustion engines are notoriously inefficient. They average only about 20% efficiency, meaning that only 20% of the energy in the fuel that is actually used is converted into motion. The vast majority of energy and an internal combustion engine is converted to heat. Electric motors are about three times more efficient than internal combustion engines.

In fact, diesel locomotives use diesel fuel, but they use it to run a generator which creates electricity that actually powers the train. That's how efficient they are. With all the stuff that's missing from electric vehicles, they are significantly cheaper to own and operate than regular cars are. This is especially true for companies with large fleets of vehicles. Of course, I haven't even touched on the environmental benefits. Even if the electricity for an electric vehicle is produced at a coal-burning power plant, it's still more efficient than a gasoline-powered car. They hardly make any noise, which means that the largest source of noise pollution in most cities would disappear as people switch to electric vehicles. Likewise, if you live in a place that snows, you might be used

to the black sludge that accumulates on roads and near the tires of cars. Most of that would go away as well, as there wouldn't be any particulate exhaust. The performance of electric cars has overtaken traditional cars as well. They are no longer the pokey golf cart-type vehicles that can't go very far or fast. Motor Trend magazine recently released the test results of the Model S Plaid, which went from zero to 60 miles per hour in 1.98 seconds. it was the fastest result of any production car that they have ever tested. One perk that people are now realizing is that you can drive an electric car out of a flood.

Because they don't need oxygen to burn anything, if your vehicle should be caught in a flash flood, you can probably drive right out. There have been videos coming out of China recently of people doing just that in their electric cars. The point I'm trying to make is that there are real engineering reasons why electric cars are better than internal combustion engine cars. Most of this was known 120 years ago, but we just didn't have the battery technology back then to make electric cars competitive.

So it sounds like I'm a huge cheerleader for electric cars. What's the downside? The downside is, I think, much less than the upside, but they do exist. For starters, as of right now, you can't charge an electric vehicle as fast as you can fill up a tank full of gasoline. For the vast majority people, this doesn't matter because most people just drive around their town, which is well below the distance modern electric cars can drive. You just charge your car at home overnight.

The newest mile cars can supposedly go from 20 to 80% charge in 15 minutes. Another concern right now is price. Currently, electric vehicles are very expensive. However, as with all technology, this is falling quickly, and we're probably very close to the first sub-30,000-dollar electric vehicle. Much of the reason for the high price of electric cars was because it was a conscious decision to focus on higher-end models because that's where the money was. Also, the cost of lithium batteries keeps falling. They have fallen in price 98% over the last 30 years.

Also, as of right now, you actually can't tow an electric car. This is because of how the motors are hooked up to the wheels. They can't just spin freely in neutral. However, there are ways around this if you just use a flatbed instead of a tow truck. Another thing is the infrastructure. We have a well-developed infrastructure for gasoline. Right now, however, if you want to charge your car away from home, finding a place to charge it might be difficult.

It's getting better, but it will take time to develop a full-blown charging system. As of right now, a cross-country road trip, an electric car would be much more difficult than with gasoline, but depending on your route, it is possible. An electric car is also much more difficult to tinker around with. There is less for a mechanic to do because the whole system is much simpler. So if something does go wrong, it probably can't be fixed in a garage. Finally, lithium ion batteries can be dangerous if they're punctured, but this is also true for a tank full of gasoline.

Much of the future of electric cars, and much of our modern world, really, will be dependent on advances in battery technology. Almost every week there's news about advances in batteries. One of the biggest advances, which I'll probably talk about more in depth any future episode is Solid-State Batteries. Solid-state batteries use a solid electrolyte, whereas lithium-ion batteries use a liquid electrolyte. Solid-state batteries might be as revolutionary as lithium-ion batteries were decades ago. They will store more power, as much as two-and-a-half times as much, charge faster,

will have a longer life cycle, and will be safer. They really do check all of the boxes. So, electric cars are a technology that have been with us for a very much. very long time, and their benefits have been known for well over 100 years. The only reason why they didn't become the predominant form of personal transportation is that battery technology didn't keep up with the advances in internal combustion engines. Now that battery technology has caught up, however, and is looking to improve even more. After almost a century, the time for electric cars may finally be here. The associate producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Thor Thompson.

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