CHAPTER 2 History of Vehicle Electrification Electricity may just be one of the most overlooked modern “conveniences” of our time. It tends to be taken for granted until we experience a power outage, then we realize just how deep-rooted it has become in our daily lives. One of the most interesting facts about electricity and, in particular, electrical energy storage and electric vehicles is that they are not entirely new ideas. In this chapter, we will review the history related to the growth of the electricity market, battery energy storage, and the electric vehicle.
Here we will follow the timeline from the earliest known energy storage batteries to the late-industrial revolution when electricity became available to the masses all the way to the charge toward vehicle electrification that began in the late-1800s and continues into today. But you may ask why should we care about the history of the electric storage battery and the electric vehicle? As has been stated many times before “Those that cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” (Santayana, 1905). As with any technological innovation, the energy storage battery, particularly as it relates to vehicle electrification, has had many fits and starts over the past 150 years or so.
So gaining a basic understanding of how the technol- ogy has come to evolve may play an important role in understanding where it may continue to go in the future and what the key enablers are to making it truly successful today. The adoption of a new technology does not always happen quickly and in fact may be heavily reliant on other factors. The chart shown in Figure 1 below, originally printed in the New York Times (Felton, 2008), shows new technology introductions compared to the percent of US households that have adopted them.
From this, we can see that a new technology, even one that is truly revolutionary at the time of its introduction such as the telephone or electricity, may take a very long time to become fully adopted by a market user. Yet, we also see that the rate of adoption is speeding up compared to 100 years ago. While it took nearly 100 years for telephones to reach nearly 90% of US households, we see that more recent technological innovations such as the cell phone has achieved almost the same level of market penetration in just over 20 years, less than one-fifth of the time.
During this period, society has continued to evolve just as technology has, changing from a largely agrarian- based culture to a very transient postindustrial culture. These impacts were not lost on the battery and electrification markets. When the first electric vehicles were introduced to the US, neither the average consumer nor retailer had electrical service. So the early adoption by private consumers, which showed some great early progress, was quickly stymied without the means to supply the electricity needed for The Handbook of Lithium-Ion Battery Pack Design. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-801456-1.00002-6 Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 9