News from CarJunky.com
by ed newman
I was looking through the 36 page car section of a Popular Mechanics when the following article by Roger Huntington caught my eye: "How Far Can We Go With The Piston Engine?" The article begins like this. "An early death for the age-old internal combustion piston engine is the prediction of some people. They say the exhaust can't be cleaned up enough to meet future air-pollution and antismog laws and that we'll be running around with batteries, steam, fuel cells and atomic engines in another ten years."
This was written in 1969, before the quick lube / Do-It-For-Me market emerged, and eighteen years before the AOCA was a twinkle in its founders' eyes. Seems to me these words could have been written in '79 or '89 or '99. Or even yesterday. Is this picture of the near future more relevant today than it was then?
IT'S ELECTRIC
One way to get a perspective is to look back to the first days of automobile transportation. Did you know that electric cars were the rage then as well?
When first developed, the internal combustion engine did not take the motoring public by storm. Though many inventors produced various designs for this novel approach to mobility, Gottlieb Daimler is often credited with developing the first prototype of the modern gas engine, including a vertical cylinder with gasoline injected through a carburetor. A year later, in 1886, Karl Benz obtained the first patent for a gas fueled car and the horseless carriage was on its way.
During this same time period carriages were also being powered by fuel cells. As early as 1842 an electric road vehicle was powered by a non-rechargeable battery. Improvements in the battery made battery powered vehicles increasingly practical, and by 1899 there were more electric cars on the road in Britain and France than there were gas powered vehicles. In the late 1890's there was even a New York City taxi fleet composed of electric cars.
Electric cars were quieter, cleaner, and offered a much more pleasant motoring experience. And they could run at a pretty decent clip as well. In 1899 a Belgian built electric car called "La Jamais Contente" was clocked at 68 miles per hour, setting a world land speed record. The gas powered counterpart was a hand-cranked contraption that smelled, vibrated a lot and made a lot of noise. The hardest part of all was changing gears, which you didn't have to do in an electric car.
Electric vehicles did have their limitations. First, they were expensive. Second, they had a range of less than 20 miles, which became problematic in a wide open country like the United States.
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