We start in
the 1830s, with Scotland’s Robert Anderson, whose motorized carriage was built sometime between 1832 and ’39.
Batteries (galvanic cells) were not yet rechargeable, so it was more a parlor trick (“Look! No horse nor ox, yet it moves!”) than a transportation device.
Another Scot, Robert Davidson of Aberdeen, built a prototype electric locomotive in 1837.
A bigger, better version, demonstrated in 1841, could go 1.5 miles at 4 mph towing six tons.
Then it needed new batteries.
This impressive performance so alarmed railway workers (who saw it as a threat to their jobs tending steam engines) that they destroyed Davidson’s devil machine, which he’d named Galvani.
Batteries that could be recharged came along in 1859, making the electric-car idea more viable. Around 1884, inventor Thomas Parker helped deploy electric-powered trams and built prototype electric cars in England. By 1890, a Scotland-born chemist living in Des Moines, Iowa, William Morrison, applied for a patent on the electric carriage he’d built perhaps as early as 1887.
It appeared in a city parade in 1888, according to the
Des Moines Register. With front-wheel drive, 4 horsepower, and a reported top speed of 20 mph, it had 24 battery cells that needed recharging every 50 miles. Morrison’s self-propelled carriage was a sensation at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, also known as the famed World’s Columbian Exhibition.
Morrison himself was more interested in the batteries than in mobility, but he’d sparked the imagination of other inventors.
Only place all electric vehicles really needed, is not on Earth
When NASA contracted Boeing to produce a “car” for use on the moon, electric was the obvious choice for an airless environment.
General Motors’ Delco division was a major subcontractor for the drive-control system and the motors on the Lunar Roving Vehicle
There were four DC motors, one in each wheel, making
one-quarter horsepower apiece and capable of up to 10,000 rpm.
Four LRVs were built at a
cost of $38 million, an overrun of 100 percent on the original $19 million projection.
Driven nine times (three excursions on each of three missions), it was the most exotic “car” ever.
First deployed on the Apollo 15 mission in 1971 (as shown here), the LRV used non-rechargeable silver-zinc potassium hydroxide batteries with a stated capacity of 121 amp-hours.
Steering at both axles also was by electric motor drawing on the same batteries.
Built of aluminum tubes and foldable in the center to stow onboard the Apollo lunar lander, it weighed 460 pounds (in Earth's gravity) without passengers, whose space suits had to be redesigned so they could sit in it.
The LRV could go 8 mph in theory, but the lunar surface demanded more cautious speed.
On Apollo 15, it moved about 17 miles over 3 hours, averaging less than 6 mph.
On Apollo 17, the last lunar mission, the LRV traveled about 22 miles total and the astronauts got nearly 5 miles away from their landing module.
