The combustion engine’s end: a landmark series
As the age of petroleum-powered vehicles draws to a close, James Langton looks at its beginnings and impact – from Bertha Benz’s pioneering drive through Germany to Sheikh Zayed’s Maybach – in the first of a four-part series
The internal combustion engine is facing a watershed moment – major manufacturer Volvo will stop producing petroleum-powered vehicles by 2021, and countries in Europe, including the UK, have vowed to ban their sale before 2040. We take a look at the story of one of the most successful technologies of the past 100 years, and how it has impacted life in the UAE
The age of the internal combustion engine began when a wife took her husband’s newly built car without permission to visit her mother. It was August 1888 and the woman was Bertha Benz, whose husband Karl was the inventor of the Benz Patent-Motorwagen.
Early demonstrations of the spluttering Benz had failed to convince the public of its usefulness, and the commercial prospects for the world’s first car looked grim. Enter Mrs Benz.
Gathering two of her sons, she left her home in Manheim, Germany, to drive the 106 kilometres to her mother’s house in Pforzheim, becoming the first person to drive an automobile over more than a short trial distance and proving the car’s practicality to the public.
The drive took an entire day and was fraught with problems. The three-wheel car frequently overheated, and the brakes needed to be repaired with shoe leather.
The following day, Mrs Benz drove back to her astonished husband, whose soon-reinvigorated company would, years later, merge with another named for creator Emil Jellinek’s daughter, Mercedes. The rest, as they say, is history.
Now, 129 years later, the obituaries are finally being written for the internal combustion engine. It has had a good run.
Henry Ford made the car available to the common man with the Model T in 1908, and his company has since produced more than 350 million vehicles. Annual car production worldwide is now about 60 million.
If the car is still as popular as ever, the same cannot be said of its engine. It is blamed for polluting the air of our cities and contributing significantly to climate change. It consumes vast quantities of finite hydrocarbons and kills an estimated 1.3 million people a year.
That’s the equivalent of four A380 super-jumbo jets crashing every day. The internal combustion engine cannot be blamed for those deaths, or for the estimated 20 to 50 million injured in road accidents annually, but the electric future that will replace petrol and diesel is bound closely to driverless vehicles and the expectation that our roads will be safer and cleaner.
Nowhere will this seismic change be felt more deeply than in the UAE. The country’s love affair with the internal combustion engine runs deep.
This is the home of the world’s biggest Rolls-Royce dealership, a country whose police drive a Bugatti Veyron and where a personalised number plate of simply “5” recently sold for Dh32 million.
No records have been found for the first car in what is now the UAE, but at least two vehicles arrived in 1936 with a geological expedition to search for possible sites to drill for oil.
Imported from Bahrain, the first petrol-powered vehicles to arrive were a saloon car, probably a British-built Daimler, and a pick-up truck, probably a Dodge or a Ford.
Both vehicles struggled with the conditions, frequently bogging down in the glue-like soil of the sabkha after rain and having to be loaded onto the deck of a dhow for long stretches. Driving into the interior, the geologists found many who had never seen a car before and who fled at the sound of its horn.
But archive records show that these cars were perhaps not alone in the region. At the request of Sheikh Hamad Al Khalifa, who ruled Bahrain from 1932 to 1942, British officials searched dealers in what is now Pakistan in 1929.
It took more than three years, but Sheikh Hamad was eventually sold a reconditioned Studebaker from T A Jeewanji and Sons of Karachi.
About the same time, there are also passing references to a vehicle belonging to Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, then Crown Prince of Dubai and aged in his mid-20s.
It was Sheikh Rashid who once remarked: “My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel,” reflecting his cautiousness about the sustainability of financial reliance on oil.
The end of the Second World War and the renewed push for oil exploration in the 1950s ushered in the age of the petrol engine. Land Rovers, developed from a British military vehicle, began to arrive in large numbers along with the more powerful American Dodge Power Wagon, which had the added appeal of smoother suspension and air conditioning.
Some wanted something with a little more flair. Despite the lack of roads and the challenges of desert driving, it was American cars that represented luxury and glamour in 1950s Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
The Ruler of Abu Dhabi at the time, Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan, acquired a bright yellow Cadillac in which he drove to a historic border summit in Buraimi with the Sultan of Oman in 1955, accompanied by a lorry load of guards to push it out of the sand when it (frequently) became stuck.
The Ruler’s brother, Sheikh Hazza bin Sultan, preferred a
red and white 1957 Ford Ranchero. Sheikh Zayed, the founding President, in his first years as Ruler of Abu Dhabi preferred to drive a 1962 Chevrolet Bel-Air on his desert travels.
In March 1958, oil was discovered. As it began to flow in 1962, so did widespread prosperity. Cars became a symbol of this new wealth, even though the only roads were hardpacked sand tracks through town.
In Dubai, the newly formed Al Futtaim Motors organised the first shipment of Toyota Toyopet saloon cars and Land Cruisers.
That year also saw the establishment of what would become the Emirates Motor Company, a dealership selling Mercedes vehicles in Abu Dhabi and Al Ain. Four years earlier, the founder, Abdul Jalil Al Fahim, set up a car spares workshop next to a small family textile and grocery shop on the Al Ain road.
By 1967, Al Fahim’s order of 13 ultra-luxury Mercedes-Benz 600 Pullman cars was causing such astonishment in Stuttgart that the Germans sent a delegation to Abu Dhabi, instructed to investigate how a car traditionally associated with world leaders and movie stars was now in huge demand in the desert.
Over the next decade, sand gave way to asphalt; roads reached out from Dubai to Sharjah and the Northern Emirates. The old camel route from Al Ain to Abu Dhabi was replaced with tarmac and by the mid-1970s, a highway finally connected the new capital of the UAE with Dubai.
For the next 40 years, the internal combustion engine ruled the roads. Gas-guzzling, fully loaded opulence seemed to define the country’s image.
Sheikh Zayed switched his Chevrolet Bel-Air for German vehicles, including a Mercedes-Maybach.
Even in old age, he still liked to take to the roads to see his people. At the Sheikh Zayed Centre in Al Bateen, you can still see the handle fitted just above the passenger seat door to help him get inside his white BMW.
It was inevitable that Abu Dhabi would later join the elite world of F1 motorsport, with its Yas Marina Circuit, and that the capital would become the backdrop for one of the films in the Fast and Furious franchise.
With a canny sense of publicity, Dubai added an increasingly exotic series of cars to its police fleet, ensuring the kind of international media attention money cannot buy.
In this sort of car-obsessed culture, the internal combustion engine seemed destined to rule for ever. But things are changing. Electric charging stations are being added to many locations, while Tesla, the electric car maker created by Elon Musk, has opened its first Middle East showroom and service centre in Dubai.
Their numbers are few and the first models remain a novelty – but then, 130 years ago, so was Bertha Benz and the Benz Patent-Motorwagen.
An order of 13 MercedesBenz 600 Pullman cars in the 1960s prompted Stuttgart to send a delegation to Abu Dhabi