Note: my view on electric cars is portrayed in this blog post, along with this update.
Imagine a world where we’ve been doing EV cars for a hundred plus years, and the ICE vehicles are The New Technology™.
Thing is, there was a time when that was thought as one of the possible futures. Originally, when the first cars were coming out, the question was between Steam and Electric, with a small system of electric chargers developed along the East Coast. The ICE engine was a new enough technology then that people were looking as askance at that as many are looking at EVs today.
Of course, ICE ended up triumphant. ICE engines were easier to control than Steam engines and the fuel and engine took up much less space than with steam; ICE engines also were able to go to the vast majority of areas which had not yet been hooked up with electricity – all the rural areas, plus many other areas that were dependent of gas and coal for lighting as well as cooking and heating. And once they figured out how to safely carry large amounts of gasoline, the ICE engine gave a flexibility which The Railroad denied (their travel dependent on stations and schedules) and that both Electric and Steam couldn’t conceive of at the time.
(and yes, Electric vehicles were labeled “women’s cars™” while Gas vehicles were labeled “Men’s Vehicles™.” I believe it was a minor point, one that maybe worked in the background as the advantages of a mobility untethered by feedstock, coal or a charging network made themselves known, but I note it because I’ve heard it.)
But…what if Lead Batteries turned out to be a bit more able to store energy than they ended up being – enough for the development of areas distant from the tracks that carried Trains and Streetcars? What if Car Ownership ended up driving the Electrification of the Rural areas like it drove the development of the network of Gas Stations in real life? What if all the Lead that we ended up using for our automobility, instead of going out the tailpipe, ended up dripping from old and abandoned cars while they sat for the night? What if Home Ownership was a decent way to insure that you didn’t have to make any extra stops (for gassing up) every so often, instead of merely a way to move away from crowded apartment living at the mercy of the local transit company (and yes, I’m a transit fan; doesn’t mean I avoid knowing the reasons why people embraced cars in the first place)?
Here’s a look at how things would have gone had we gone fully electric (italicized to mark it as a thought exercise):
To start off, battery technology would have had to make some amazing leaps. From fifty miles between overnight charges, you’d have to create something which would have been able to hold enough charge for a vehicle to go 300-500 miles without any issues. It would have had to gotten lighter, plus they would have had to figure out a way to make it solid so that it didn’t slosh around or threaten to eat through the floor (or walls) of the car it was in. Then, as the storage power grew, they’d have to deal with the issue of runaway ignition (once the car lights up it’s going to burn through EVERYTHING before it calms down) much sooner than they did in our timeline (i.e. NOW).
Now it’s entirely possible that they would have done all this, complete with the discovery of the usefulness of Lithium much sooner than what happened with us now. With all the minds working with the utility and car companies, they would likely have bankrolled what was needed to figure things out by the mid-1930s, in time to help out with WWII – assuming that WWII would have happened the way it did.
However, by the fifties the basics of Batteries would have been worked out. Two hundred miles per charge meant that people didn’t have to charge their cars daily and both work and shopping were within reach, charges going for a half hour to an hour meant that longer trips, while seeming a bit leisurely to our standards, were a bit safer since fatigue had its limits. That the range stood up pretty much to the stresses of the weather and other stuff meant you could count on your charge being regular; and the roads are not that much different from the way they are in our timeline (as the battery weighs nowhere near where it does here, but balances the car towards a slightly lighter weight.
By now, of course, we’re talking 400-500 miles of charge before renewing the battery, and while the half hour of waiting while the battery charges may seem like a bit much (especially with the new ICE technology promising two minute fill ups that translate to ten minutes tops with a stop at a convenience store), there’s always the half hour of chatting with the fellow travelers that makes the wait worthwhile…and if not that, you’re talking about time to eat, time to hit the restroom, and time to think.
Not only that, but you’re talking about going wherever you want to go. Thanks to the ubiquity of the rural electrical systems, you can find chargers pretty much where you need them, and usually plenty enough so that the only wait you get is when you’re charging. Yes, there are places where there’s distances between charging stations, but those areas are few, far between, and likely connected to the main lines in their own ways that aren’t necessarily direct (US 50 and US 6 and The Extraterrestrial Highway in Nevada come to mind).
Compare this, of course, with an ICE car owner outside of the triumvirate of Texas/Oklahoma, Southern California and Pennsylvania. To travel anywhere outside of your neighborhood would mean figuring out where the gas stations were that you could fill up at, and hoping you don’t get too distracted or the engine decides to turn its thirst for Dinosaur Juice into a raging drunk. There’s a term for this – Range Anxiety, and that hasn’t been a part of driving electric in decades.
Then there’s the issue of burning ICE cars. We’ve long dealt with the issue of burning batteries, from cooling systems to different chemistries; once we came up with a solid state battery that held plenty of energy in a safe way all that we needed to do was affix an emergency cooling system to insure that there was little possibility of a fire going out of control before the driver and passengers could escape the car. And sure, there are still more fires from EVs than from ICE cars; between the older cars that was no longer getting regular checkups, the occasional arson and the sheer number of EVs (and the sheer LACK of number of ICE Cars) that’s to be expected. Still, the ICE cars can burn like crazy because the liquid can leak all over the engine, not only that but how many news items have we heard of people going 3-5-10 miles before passing out because their ICE car was on fire? New EVs have systems to control and put out fires, plus alarms that warn the people within when they have to bail and systems that stop the car so that the passengers only have to worry about getting out of the burning EV car – much safer than the ICE cars that we don’t know what to sense for, danger-wise.
Indeed, it seems the only thing that ICE fanatics would actually have a point with are the number of electrical wires that would likely be tossed aside should we shift to ICE cars. This, of course, would be countered in an argument by the expansion of liquid pollutants – leaking gasoline, various lubricants that Internal Combustion Engines need to run, and the obnoxious gasses coming out of this thing called a tailpipe.
Indeed, about the only people who would really like ICE vehicles are:
- Snobs who like to look different just because,
- GM haters who constantly cry out how “GM Killed The ICE Car, using that to justify their hatred of the company (which, honestly, has done a lot to deserve said hatred; whether we’re talking about the experimental ICE-1 they leased, then gathered up and crushed is more a moot point.
- Do-it-yourself hobbyists interested in having something DIFFERENT for once.
So…basically, a funhouse mirror into what’s going on today. Hopefully I was able to get that across.
Sorry I'm Late… 