The ICE Age
As with the steam age, the world quickly developed the necessary infrastructure to support mass automobile adoption. From the arrival of the affordable Model T in 1908, the US, for example, had a nationwide road network established in just 20 years. Gas stations, garages, tire services and highway rest stops sprung up almost overnight. Range anxiety was short-lived with a vast network of gas stations across the world. The doubters for this new age gradually faded away and the internal combustion engine became king in less than 25 years. The car soon became the ultimate freedom machine. Cars have since terraformed our world with over 32 billion kilometres of road now crisscrossing the earth today, but the ICE age was almost the electric car age. Electric cars came first.
In as early as 1832 the electric carriage was born by Scot Robert Anderson. This crude first attempt never gained traction and others flirted with electric motor driven wagons for a few decades after. Rechargeable batteries came on the scene in 1859 with the first lead-acid batteries. By 1900 one-third of all cars in America were electric. Electric cars were relatively low speed, high cost and low range in comparison to the ICE cars that followed. Thomas Parker built the first production electric car in 1884 in England after becoming concerned about the effects of pollution having electrified underground London railways. 110 years before Tesla Cars was born, a fleet of electric taxis roamed the streets of London. In New York too, electric cabs were introduced in 1897 with 62 Hansom cabs.
Despite a limited range and lack of national electricity networks, which largely confined electric cars to cities, over 30,000 electric cars were registered in the United States, outselling steam and gasoline-powered vehicles by 1910. A form of battery swap subscription service was pioneered in the US to try to overcome the limitations with range and lack of charging infrastructure. Thomas Edison developed an electric car in 1912 with a range of 190 miles. The nickel-iron battery that powered it, however, was expensive to produce compared to a gasoline engine making the car cost almost three times more than the Ford Model T, so it failed.
The mass discovery of oil reserves made the availability of cheap gasoline widespread. This, coupled with the newly built road networks and affordable gas cars, sealed the fate of the fledging early electric car industry. Henry Ford worked for Edison, but then his own mass-produced, simple to maintain car sold 60 million units and changed the world as we know it. By the 1920s the electric car was dead.
Apart from small delivery vans, golf carts and milk floats the electric car faded into obscurity for the next 50 years. It made a brief comeback in the 1960s with early hybrid concepts and prototypes that never really gained public interest or made it to mass production. The electric Lunar Roving Vehicle or moon buggy, three in total, covered over 100km on the surface of the Moon during the Apollo missions in the early 1970s, the first cars to be sent into space, (until Elon Musk launched his early edition Tesla Roadster onboard one of his Space X test flights in 2018).
With the low cost of gas, the incredible multi-lane highways and huge competition from a multitude of car manufacturers, the ICE age exploded. Car ownership grew exponentially to a global peak of over 1.4 billion vehicles today, less than 1% of them electric. Our world has been fundamentally shaped by the ubiquitous car. Almost every aspect of life is centred around moving. Our cities are shaped by cars; streets, pedestrian systems, car parks, homes, workplaces and laws have been dictated by the car. The ICE age has spawned everything from motorsports, accessible holiday escapes to oil and service station empires. There are over 110,000 gas stations in the US alone. The top ten largest oil companies own and operate over 200,000 gas stations worldwide. Building, maintaining and servicing ICE cars has created whole industries and complex supply chains across the globe. There are almost four billion tires produced each year globally. The world’s three largest economies, US, EU, and China scrap almost 25 million cars per year. Modern life today simply couldn’t function without cars.
However, whether you build, sell, own, rent, or share a car, the ICE world as we know it is rapidly coming to an end. It is not just the replacement of the drive train from gas to electricity that will be different; whole industries and businesses are about to disappear. New opportunities are being created and new challenges are emerging. Sometimes the wrong technology wins and the electric car was largely forgotten for a century, until now. With the environmental necessity and the electric resurrection, the very essence of our interaction and use of the car is about to be radically altered and nobody is immune.
