10 Chapter 2 Figure 1 Rate of technology adoption. New York Times (Felton (2008)). charging the vehicles and was in fact limited to either industrial companies or the very wealthy, both of whom were early adopters of electrical service. But even as electrical service availability increased, the electric vehicle demand dropped.
There were many potential reasons and causes for this, but they range from the introduction of competing technologies such as the internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle powered by liquid fuels; the rapid growth of the American interstate system, which increased the distance that vehicles needed to drive; the low cost and great availability of gasoline as a fuel source; and the American’s continuous desire for mobility. So back to the question at hand, will we be forced to repeat the history of electric vehicles and see them die another slow death? Will the market today be stymied again due to the lack of a charging infrastructure?
Will range limitations and charging times continue to move consumers away from electric vehicles? But let us back up for just a moment; before we delve into the history of the electric vehicle, we should understand where the enabling technology came from. The introduction and growth of the electric vehicle was only empowered due to the invention of an energy storage technology that offered both high energy storage capability and the ability recharge that energy source—that is where the battery comes into the story.
This chapter will attempt to tell the story of how the technology has evolved in order for the reader to gain an understanding of what barriers we may still need to overcome in order to gain true market acceptance and mass market adoption. The History of the Modern Storage Battery We generally think of batteries as being a recent invention; however, there is evidence that batteries have been in use for at least the past 2000 years. In the 1930s, a German archeologist was working on a construction site in Baghdad and found something that quite literally