Sketchy EVs #2: Back to the Future of EV Adoption

Deja eVu all over again?

Dec 07, 2023

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Learning science: EV-curious to EV-confident. ←Dec 1-15

It’s Sketchy EV Time: 10 ideas for 2023

Today, we’re on Sketch #2: Back to the Future of Adoption. If you want to catch up, the intro is here. Here’s Sketch #1: Fuel + Drivetrain Basics.

Almost all of our cars run on gasoline. But it hasn’t always been that way.

Let’s take a minute and head back to 1900, when the mix of cars on US was very different. Like Charlie Munger (RIP) said, “There are answers worth billions of dollars in a $30 history book.”

Cars on US roads: 1900-2022

Today’s sketch is a timeline of gas, electric and steam car adoption — each an acceptable answer to our vehicle design equation: fuel + drivetrain = vehicle motion.

On the left edge are data for 1900.

There were 4,192 private cars reported in the 1900 US census:

40% (1,681) ran on steam,
38% (1,575) were electric (Congrats to Jeremy Hunnewell, who got closest to this, 33%, in the post #1 pop-quiz.),
20% (936) ran on gasoline.

On the right edge are data from 2022.

There were more than 280 million cars in the US last year.

99% (276 Million) ran on gas or diesel last year.
1.2% (3.4 Million) were EVs or plug-in hybrids.

What happened in between?

Anyone, Anyone? Remember our first sketch?

Energy density happened. It’s what makes gasoline a magic fuel. It’s why gas vehicles won this battle then went on to change the planet.

An Ode to Steam

Everybody knew about steam in 1900. It was in trains. And in boats. And in the cities where most of those 4,192 cars were. It was spinning generators to make electricity that was lighting up their world.

Steam was sexy and fast. Stanley, maker of the popular Steamer, set a land-speed record in 1906 at 127 mph. And torque. It made lots of torque.

For the state of the art in steam, watch Jay Leno drive his 1925 Doble here. It was quiet, fast. It had a start-up checklist 13 steps long and cost 20 grand when a Ford Model T gas car was $260.

A dead heat between steam & electric — for a hot minute

With steam at 40% and electric 38%, let’s break down the early 1900’s car market:

Roads weren’t really roads outside big cities. Range anxiety wasn’t a thing in this first chapter of EVs. Get out of the city before the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, and you’d better have aspirin for the bumps, a good shovel and a few spare parts. Cities leveled the playing field for EVs and steam cars - each of which had 20-50 miles of range. The idea of a car as a tool for exploring the great American roadway was still a decade or two away.
Steam and electric were clean and quiet, gas not yet. Gas cars were a mess: loud, stinky, hot, stuff leaking everywhere. Most steam cars were quieter. EVs definitely were.
Electric was dead simple, and easy to start. Steam cars? You needed a checklist. And 30 minutes to get the boiler going in winter. Gas required hand cranking until Charles Kettering’s electric starter came along in 1912.
Henry Ford hadn’t picked a horse yet. As late as 1914, eight years after the first model T was built, Henry Ford, and his DC-electricity-obsessed friend, Thomas Edison, were still experimenting with electrics. Here’s a 1913 prototype:
EVs rode an eerily familiar wave of rich-dudes-building-shiny-things. As Jill Jonnes writes in her historical fiction page-turner, Empires of Light, three rich white dudes were comparing how long their wires were back then, just like Musk and Bezos do with rockets today. Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse were competing to build power grids to electrify cities, and EVs rode their infrastructure wave.

That Chicago EV Charger Map

Nowhere was this fight nastier than in Chicago, where, for the 1893 World’s Fair, Thomas Edison made a big push to run the fair on DC power instead of the AC Tesla and Westinghouse backed. Edison lost. But that fight kick-started a Chicago power grid that 20 years later had more 150 Amp DC fast chargers than most cities in the US today.

But not even that kind of infrastructure could save EVs. As soon as the car conversation shifted from moving within cities to moving between them, the end for steam and EVs came quickly.

Gasoline wins

By the mid 20s, only a handful of steam and electric cars were being sold. It was a gasoline world from then on.

Ford chooses gas for his assembly line

You could argue that whichever technology went down Ford’s assembly line would have benefitted from the economies of scale enjoyed by the Model T. He chose gas, and his cost per car ran down the blue curve quickly.

Credit: The Geography of Transport Systems

Head out on the highway…

When the federal highway act of 1916 passed, it reflected the post World War psyche of a nation ready to look inwards and maybe explore the homeland — to roam. Eisenhower himself did a road-trip in 1919 that was “part victory lap, part publicity stunt.” Ford felt it, too; his only son Edsel did a similar run to San Francisco in 1915.

Energy Density FTVDW - For The Vehicle Design Win

If cars were to enable this new wave of expansion, they’d need fuel for the journey. Let’s look at what it might have taken to 10X range from the 20 miles of range that could work in most 1900 cities to the 200-mile spec of the Model T:

Electric: Let’s try a 1911 Studebaker Electric. With a range of 21 miles, its battery weighed 970 lbs. Taking that to 200 miles would mean another 9,000 pounds of battery.
Steam: To boost range in a steam car, we’ll need to add more kerosene. With an energy density greater than gas, we’ll let steam have this one for free since it’s the water that gets us here; we’d need to add 450 gallons of water to boil on a 200 mile trip. At 8.3 lbs/gallon, that’s 3,735 extra pounds, not counting the steel for the tank.
Gas: At 20 miles per gallon, Ford could have gotten away with a 2-gallon tank in a city version of the T. Some 1900 cars held less than 2 gallons. At 6 lbs/gallon, expanding from 2 to 10 gallons would be another 48 pounds of fuel. Maybe another 30-50 lbs for the extra steel. Call it 100 extra pounds — 8% of the 1500 lb curb weight on a model T. That’s gas doing its energy density thing.

Energy Density FTIW - For The Infrastructure Win

I think Ford knew gas’s super power would help it win the infrastructure game, too.

Gas: Ford knew that you could build gas stations almost as fast as you could build roads. With the first underground gas storage tank proven in 1898, all it really took beyond digging that big hole was driving a trailer full of fuel down a brand new road to add gas infrastructure at the furthest edge of the road network.
Steam would have required mechanics with lots of tools and water stops every 20 miles. On top of a kerosene network to match the scale of the gas infrastructure we just described.
Electric would need wires, transformers and power plants. Lots of them. I’m sure Edison was promising this to Ford imminently, but I wonder if those 1913 EVs were as much for Edison as they were for Ford?

Jamie Merrill, Rob Sharp and Simon Usborne drop an amazing infrastructure stat on this in their great piece, Model T Ford: The car that changed our world:

With a 10-gallon tank and 20 miles per gallon fuel economy, the first Model T had a range in excess of the combined total of properly laid roads in the United States at the time (155 miles).

Meanwhile, the competition inside cities was getting even tougher — New York’s IRT subway line quadrupled from 1904 to 1924. Gas cars were no longer city-folks’ toys; they were now tools for making America more American.

Back to the Future: EVs Today

Back to today’s sketch. After 100 years of nothing but pink on our timeline, there’s a little blue triangle emerging in the bottom right corner. What will happen from here?

Will EVs repeat history and stall out as just cars for rich people in cities? Almost 4,000 dealers just wrote a letter to President Biden blaming his rebates for sending the EV story in this direction.
Will EVs be able to take advantage of an electric grid that’s now much bigger than the fueling infrastructure for gas cars?
Will gas cars lose their edge? Slowly? Quickly?
Will moving to EVs mean we rely on a more diverse type of family fleet, with smaller, lighter vehicles covering our shorter trips. Did you know that 52% of the trips our 300-400 mile-range gas cars take are less than 3 miles?
Will we find creative new ways to use EVs, especially while they’re plugged in?

I don’t know the answers to any of these, but there’s some good data behind that little blue triangle. More on that soon.