This is an electric car.
And this.
Long before Elon Musk unveiled Tesla's Model 3 –
a whole 119 years before, in fact –
a guy called Albert Pope presented the Columbia
Motor Carriage, one of the first commercial electric cars.
Americans loved it – and electric cars in general.
So much so that, around the turn of the century,
they outsold gasoline-powered cars.
So what the hell happened?
Almost all vehicles on our streets today are gasoline-powered.
And even though electric cars have come back –
they certainly haven't quite broken into the mainstream.
But that's about to change.
Why did electric cars disappear?
And why are they going to make it big this time?
Let's tackle the first question first.
There were a couple of reasons why the electric
car failed in the early 1900s.
But…
"…ultimately the problem is the batteries."
This is Tom Standage,
the deputy editor of The Economist magazine.
He's written a whole book on the history of the car.
"The lead-acid battery, which is what these early
cars were using, was very cheap.
But it doesn't pack a lot of energy into a
small space and it's very heavy."
This meant you couldn't go very far in them,
usually under 70 kilometers.
Even two of the brightest minds of the time,
Henry Ford and Thomas Edison,
who wanted to develop an affordable electric car,
were not able to solve this.
And so the internal combustion engine took the lead.
"They gradually got more reliable.
The fact that you could just head out into the open
roads and you'd probably be able to find fuel
for this vehicle in a hardware store or in
a chemist – that gave them an edge.
Because people who were buying these early cars were
generally rich people who wanted to go on adventures."
Electric car makers had one last idea to save their products:
they started marketing it specifically to women.
"Because they're clean and quiet and you don't have
to be strong to turn the handle to get them started.
So these were all seen as sort of feminine attributes."
But back then most drivers were men.
And so the electric car gradually turned into a niche
product – and then disappeared completely.
Throughout the twentieth century, there have been
some attempts to revive them.
For example in the 70s, when the oil crisis had people
looking for alternative sources of energy.
But as battery technology hadn't progressed much,
the comeback was short-lived.
In the 90s, General Motors came out with the EV1.
It attracted somewhat of a cult following –
which ironically might have been a problem for the manufacturer.
"It all turned out to be a bit of a PR nightmare
because the more General Motors went on about
just how wonderful and green,
good for the environment these electric cars were,
the more the company reminded everybody how bad
for the environment all of its other cars were.
So, ultimately General Motors decided to pull the plug."
GM denied this.
But one reason why electric cars have never made it big is
that the car and oil industry probably didn't really want them to.
"Welcome, to the electric car of the future.
Sponsored by the Gasoline Producers of America.
Hello, I'm an electric car.
I can't go very fast. Or very far."
The combustion engine has been a money-printing
machine for carmakers AND oil companies.
But it now has an expiry date.
Because two things have changed.
One: battery technology has improved.
Lithium-ion batteries store more energy in a smaller space –
and they're lighter than lead-based batteries.
And two:
"The big thing that's changed is that we are
now concerned about climate change in a way
that people weren't 100 years ago.
Most people hadn't thought about that at all.
And now we recognize that pumping all of this carbon
dioxide into the atmosphere, which we've been
doing for the last 200 years or so, is affecting the climate.
And therefore we can't go on powering our cars
by burning fossil fuels."
Cars are responsible for about a tenth of energy-related CO2 emissions.
One way to get them down is to reduce the need to own a car
as much as possible – by, for example, giving
people better public transport or safer bike lanes.
And then we'll need electric cars.
Compared to combustion engine cars, they emit less
over their lifetime, up to 70 percent,
depending on where they're produced and driven.
And so the list of countries planning to ban sales of cars
with internal combustion engines is growing.
And many that are not yet on it – like the USA –
are making it very favorable to buy an EV.
Car companies are shifting as well.
"We're not waiting for the future."
"They're electrifying our entire fleet of cars."
Some faster than others.
But many of the major traditional carmakers
have set goals for electrifying their fleet.
And us?
We are changing, too.
Sales of EVs are on the rise, especially in Europe and China.
More than half of car owners say their next car will be electric.
But despite all this, the big picture still looks pretty bleak.
There are around 1.3 billion passenger vehicles on the roads –
and only 1.5% of them are electric.
Change just happens slowly, doesn't it?
Well… not really.
Change actually happens in waves.
From the flush toilet to the telephone,
the microwave to TVs, and computers.
Every innovation that's snuck into our everyday lives,
did so in the same way.
"Society adopts new technologies first very slowly –
and then very quickly."
This is Paul Drummond, who's been figuring out
what this means for electric cars.
"Over a number of decades, studies have been done
across a number of technologies in different sectors.
And we now recognize that technologies typically
follow an adoption in the shape of an S-curve."
To understand what he means, let's look at global
smartphone sales, starting in 2007,
when Apple introduced the first iPhone.
At first, they only went up slowly.
Then around 2010, as models had become better and cheaper,
sales rapidly shot up. And from about 2016,
as more and more people owned a smartphone,
they started leveling off – and then even dipping a little bit.
This pattern of change is called an S-curve
because, well, it looks like an S.
Roughly at least.
We can divide it into three phases:
emergence, diffusion and culmination.
So what does this mean for electric cars?
"It's always difficult to accurately forecast the future.
But we can see that electric vehicles
have grown in sales very rapidly."
In 2010, way less than one percent of all
cars that were sold, were electric.
By 2021, this share had grown to almost NINE percent.
"Now they're tipping probably out of this
emergence formative phase or the first phase
of the S-curve into widespread diffusion."
Going forward, this means the share of electric
cars will shoot up rapidly.
How rapidly exactly is anyone's guess.
But in one of Paul Drummond's predictions,
they could reach around 50% of new sales by 2030.
"It's very likely that we have reached a tipping
point from which there's probably no return now.
So, I think the adoption, the widespread replacement
of internal combustion engine cars with electric vehicles,
at least for sort of personal cars, is probably inevitable."
The electric car is finally set to go mainstream.
It's only a question of how quickly.
And that depends on how quickly we solve the remaining challenges.
Just putting electric cars on the roads is not enough.
The infrastructure needs to grow alongside them.
We need more charging points –
and also standardized systems, so people can reliably
charge their cars.
And the electricity grid needs to be prepared to cope with increased demand.
Different places are moving at different speeds.
Europe is approaching a quarter of new car sales being electric.
China, the biggest EV market in absolute numbers,
is putting several million electric cars on the roads every year.
In contrast, there are only 50,000 EVs on the road in India – in total.
And the share of new sales is smaller than 1 percent.
To share the benefits of electric vehicles –
like cleaner air – evenly, there need
to be policies that speed up deployment everywhere.
EVs are still expensive.
Even a small mass market model like Volkswagen's ID.3
costs close to 40,000 euros.
That's mainly because it's costly to produce batteries.
But prices are falling rapidly –
and in the near future, electric cars are forecast to cost
the same as gasoline-powered ones.
Governments can play a role in getting them there, by subsidizing them.
Much like they did in Norway, that's kind of become the world's EV posterchild.
"Did you know that Norway sells way more electric
cars per capita than the US? Norway… [laughs]"
"I think Norway has done very, very well.
So they provided for a quite long time,
very solid subsidies for the purchase of electric vehicles.
Which is now why their sales are more than 70 percent electric."
And then we also need to consider our supply of raw materials, like lithium and cobalt.
How can we reduce their impact on the environment and local communities?
And can we use better alternatives?
But these are all topics for whole new videos.
The only thing that's left to say here
is that it's crazy to think how far electric cars have come.
And by the looks of it – their journey has just begun.
"How is it where you live?
Do you see more electric cars and
more charging stations on the streets already?
Let us know in the comments.
I had a lot of fun making this video.
And I hope you had a bit of fun watching it as well.
If you did, you should subscribe to our channel,
because we have a new one
coming out for you every Friday."