Elegance and electric cars

FOR MOST of this century, electric vehicles have been a flop. Limited range and limited speed led ultimately to limited demand, despite a stream of overstated claims from manufacturers designed to keep consumers’ hopes alive. And yet, according to Michael Brian Schiffer in Taking Charge: The Electric Automobile in America (Smithsonian Institute Press, pp 225, £18.75), there was a time when electric vehicles almost succeeded in the marketplace. From about 1910 to 1916, the customers boosting the market were wealthy American women for whom the electric vehicle represented a clean, quiet and, above all, independent method of travel. By 1917, however, manufacturers realised that women did not have the financial clout to create a mass market. By the end of the decade the electric car was all but dead. But like the vehicles it describes, I do not think Schiffer’s book will create much demand.