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Influential EVs: an illustrated history of electric car design
EVs might be a hot topic now, but even before Karl Benz patented his internal combustion car in 1886, our ancestors and forebears were already finding ways to electrify a chassis with wheels. In fact gasoline, electricity, steam, coal gas, compressed air, superheated water and even a spring-motor device that stored energy running downhill and used it going uphill were all competing forms of propulsion at the dawn of the car. The earliest record of an electric passenger vehicle dates back to April 1880 and the brainchild of French inventor and electrical engineer Gustave Pierre Trouvé. Built using a James Starley English tricycle, the first electric car was a three-wheeledr with a modified Siemens electric motor and lead-acid battery pack.
Friday 11 December 2020
The first great automotive rivalry
Culture and Lifestyle Editor
Camille Jenatzy isn’t a household name today, a shame really, as the Belgian race car driver is etched into the automotive record books as the first person drive a car in excess of 100km/h, in the process setting a world land speed record. What’s more, he did it an electric car, one that he built himself.
Today, 100km/h is merely scratching the surface of most cars’ capabilities but in 1899, those types of speeds were unthinkable, certainly from that new-fangled invention, the automobile.
But, the advent of the motor car brought with it a new challenge – the pursuit of speed. And that chase for terminal velocity sparked the first great rivalry in automotive history.