The Inventor and History of Electric Car
An electric car is a car that uses electric power through an electric battery as the driving force. Here, we will inform the inventor and history of the electric car. Currently, the big car manufacturers have started competing to develop electric cars that are known as the friendly environment. The famous electric car today is Tesla electric car made by Tesla Motors.
 |
| Electric Car |
History of Electric Car
The first modern car was made by Karl Benz in 1885. Before, in the early 18th century, many scientists or innovators from Hungarian, the Netherlands and America began to focus on the concept of battery-powered vehicles and created several small-scale electric cars. Then, a British man named Robert Anderson developed a three-wheeled car that used an electric battery as a driving force in 1832. Anderson's findings are considered the world's first electric car.
In the late 18th century in America, an electric car that made by William Morrison successful made debut in 1890 which able to accommodate up to six passengers and drive at 22 km/hour. Entering the 19th century, electric cars were in its prime. Over the next 10 years, it started to show the good sales. In 1898, Ferdinand Porsche created an electric car under the name P1. He created the world's first hybrid car that can be powered by electricity and gasoline. However, the electric cars were less desirable. In 1912, the price of gasoline-fueled cars amounted to 650 dollars while electric cars around 1750 dollars.
The rapid increase of gasoline cars made and the construction of highways made the electric vehicles finally stopped developing in 1935. The electric cars began glimpsed again in 1973. American Motor Company then produced the electric jeep used by the United States post office in 1975. A few years later in 1988, General Motors led by Roger Smith began building electric cars in collaboration with AeroVironment California. The result is an electric car called EV1 but the production only started in 1996 until 1999. In 1997, Japanese car manufacturer Toyota introduced the Toyota Prius which was called a mass-produced hybrid car and managed to sell up to 18,000 units of vehicles.
The New Era of Electric Cars
In 2003, General Motors made a statement no longer producing EV1 electric cars. A few years later, Tesla Motor under the leadership of Elon Musk introduced a sports electric car with name Tesla Roadster at the International Auto Show exhibition in San Francisco with a starting price of 98,950 dollars. Since then, the countries of the world began to support the use of environmentally friendly electric cars.
In 2009, the US Department of Energy granted $ 8 billion worth of loans to Ford, Nissan, and Tesla Motor for the development of environmentally friendly vehicles. Nissan then introduced an electric car called LEAF that could run up to 114 km/hour. The electric cars then began experiencing rapid development following the rapid increase of technology and government support from many countries in the world about the environmentally friendly cars.