ELECTRIC, STEAM-POWERED VEHICLES RULED THE ROADS
Electric cars are all the rage. Preorders for Tesla’s modestly priced Model 3 electric car are closing in on 400,000, even though it probably won’t be available until late 2017.
But electric cars aren’t exactly new — they’ve been around since the late 1800s. According to the cleantechnia.com website, 38 per cent of the vehicles sold in the United States in 1900 were electric, compared to 22 per cent for gasoline cars, and 40 per cent for steam.
In Vancouver, the pioneering auto dealer Hoffmeister Bros. sold electrics alongside gas guzzlers.
“The Greatest Display of Electric and Gasoline Vehicles Extant,” proclaimed a half-page Hoffmeister Bros. ad on April 23, 1910.
The ad features six cars, three electric (the Detroit Electric, the Waverley Electric and the Studebaker Electric), and three gas (the Thomas Flier, the Marion Overland Torpedo and the Winton Six).
The 1910 electrics look more like horseless carriages than modern cars. The bodies of the Detroit and the Waverley are tall and rectangular, like an old hearse.
They were also quite luxurious. A listing for a 1910 Detroit in a Bonham’s auction said it had “curved glass front quarter windows, dual electric carriage lights on the body pillars, and embossed decorative interior leather trim.”
The Detroit Electric part of the Hoffmeister Bros. ad features a pair of elegantly dressed ladies in long dresses and stylish hats, one stepping in, one ready to drive.
“The electrics were very popular with women,” said old car expert Vern Bethel of False Creek Motors. “They didn’t have to crank (to start, like gas cars).”
Bethel said that Nelson was a hotbed of electric cars, because the city was an early convert to electric power (Nelson had B.C.’s first hydroelectric generator in 1897).
“Nelson was the greatest place on earth for electric cars,” he said.
Old car collector Rick Percy found one of Nelson’s electric cars in a shed in Slocan City in the 1960s.
“I went in and looked at it and it was like a football hit me in the head,” said Percy, 89. “Each hubcap had the date punched in it, so there was no fooling — it said 1903.”
The car still had its wooden wheels, but its batteries and brass lights were long gone.
“During the First World War, they took the batteries out and took the lamps off,” he explains. “They squashed the lamps for the brass, and they smashed up the batteries for the lead.”
Percy bought it, and set about researching the car. It was made by the City and Suburban Electric Carriage Company in England, based on a design by the Columbia car company in the U.S.
The City and Suburban was famed in England because one was owned by Queen Alexandra. The Nelson car was apparently brought from England by an executive with West Kootenay Light and Power.
“He ran it till the First World War,” said Percy. “After the First World War he put a horse in front of it and drew it by horse in parades. The last was the victory parade in 1945.”
Percy restored the electric car, and showed it in numerous events, including at Expo 86. But he never found a battery to make it run, and sold it last year.
Why did electric vehicles like this die out? One was the cost. When Henry Ford started mass produc- tion of the Model T in 1908, it was half of the cost of many electrics. There were also discoveries of oil in California and Texas that made gasoline cheaper.
The killer may have been the limited range. You had to be careful when you drove an electric car — the faster you drove, the more it drained the battery.
“If you got somebody in there who didn’t know what the hell they were doing, they’d use the full amount of power to drive down the street at a hell of a click, 10, 20, 30 miles an hour, and use up everything that was in the batteries, and then they were stuck,” said Percy.
“Whereas with gasoline cars, you just go and buy a bucket full of gas, slosh it into the tank, press on the starter and away you go.”
The early electrics are now as rare as hen’s teeth and can sell for a lot of money.
Bonham’s auctioned off a 1910 Detroit in Scottsdale, Ariz., in 2013 for $55,000 US.