History of Electric Car Batteries

Electric car batteries are older than gasoline.  Yes, it’s true! If this surprises you, you’re not alone, because the history of electric cars and their batteries is something that people are not generally aware of.  Most people think of the history of the automobile as beginning in the early 1900s, with Henry Ford’s Model T and the beginning of the oil-based economy. Or, at the very least, they assume cars ran on gas from the very beginning. But the truth of the matter is that electric car batteries predate oil – and they were around for almost a century before gasoline-powered cars came along!

No one knows for sure when the first electric car battery was created, but the earliest electric car prototype dates back to the 1800s.  Electric car designs have been around since the 1820s and cars that operated on electricity were created late in the 19^th century to follow through on the original designs that had been made.  In fact, ads for cars running on electric batteries were in newspapers as early as the first decade of the 20^th century, and at the time, even the big Detroit automakers were making electric cars.

But the electric car battery declined in popularity at that time.  The battery was bulky, did not have much range and was not capable of powering a car at rapid speeds without a huge investment of battery weight and money.  In fact, the reasons electric car batteries declined then are mostly the same reasons why they haven’t cornered a great share of the market today. When the interstate system was built in the United States and people started moving out into the suburbs, the power derived from oil trumped the electric car battery right through to the present day.

Fortunately, today electric-car technology is vastly improved, beyond the wildest dreams of the scientists and thinkers of a century ago. What was thought of as impossible is commonplace now, and what was thought of as impractical then no longer has to be so now.