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overpowered
August 18th, 2016, 11:50 PM
Jay says this thing did 100 miles on a charge, which is pretty amazing for the time.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhnjMdzGusc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baker_Motor_Vehicle

It's kind of amazing that they could do this in 1909 which was pretty good in the context of other cars of the period but it took a century for anyone to make a highly successful electric vehicle.

21Kid
August 19th, 2016, 05:20 AM
I just wonder where they'd be if the idea wasn't scrapped for petroleum cars.

If they've had 100+ year of R&D... from competing companies...just imagine how much better they would be than the Model S.

thesameguy
August 19th, 2016, 09:29 AM
Well, at under 1,000lbs and a 14mph top speed, the bar wasn't very high - but that was the pinnacle of DC motor and battery technology for decades. Just no competition for the relative ease of ICE construction and petrochem energy density. The big developments that let modern EVs do what they do evolved from smaller consumer devices - AC motors and PWM controllers and Li-Ion batteries all got invented and perfected making laptops and remote control cars and stuff. ;) The auto industry isn't really responsible for much of anything there!

overpowered
August 19th, 2016, 11:29 AM
I thought Jay said this thing did 23mph, which is still not fast but it's more than 14mph. I think he also said that the Model T had a top speed of 45mph.

Of course he also said that there weren't really roads, which is wrong. In major cities and a lot of not so major ones, roads had long since been paved smooth by 1909.

thesameguy
August 19th, 2016, 11:50 AM
I could be wrong - perhaps a different Baker I'm thinking of. Land speed records were being set by electrics in the 100mph range, so 25mph certainly was achievable. Whether the roads to support that speed existed is a question since it's gotta take a while to hit 25mph with 1 or 2hp on tap, and whether maximum range was achievable at maximum speed is another. Maximum battery dump in 1909 probably wasn't very efficient. On that note, perhaps Jay's will do 25mph for 100 miles simply on the basis he's running modern batteries. ;)

Edit: 14mph is 23kmh, so perhaps there is confusion there as well. :shrug:

KillerB
August 19th, 2016, 03:21 PM
Yeah, I doubt this has a 1909-era battery!

thesameguy
August 19th, 2016, 03:47 PM
Sure, but I could totally see Jay hiring someone to make a painfully detailed replica. :lol: Of course, it's just as likely he build a totally custom li-po pack, so.... ;)

overpowered
August 19th, 2016, 11:45 PM
He talks about the batteries in the video. He does use modern batteries but he claimed that the original batteries developed for it by Edison worked just as well but required more maintenance than modern batteries. He mentioned that the modern batteries that he uses are deep cycle batteries which implies that they are lead-acid batteries like you buy for boats or RV's. These were the batteries of choice for electric conversions in the 90's and 2000's. Tesla kind of changed the electric car battery game by figuring out how to make a more affordable Li pack.

As for the speed, given the narrow track and high center of gravity and primitive suspension, it probably wouldn't be a good idea to go very fast in that thing even if it could go fast.

As 21kid said, imagine if we had a century of serious effort at development and improvement of electric cars like we've had for petroleum powered vehicles, electric cars might have been much more viable a long time ago.

Rare White Ape
August 20th, 2016, 03:21 AM
I could hazard a guess that developments in safety would have moved at a lot faster pace if they were capable of 10-second 1/4 mile times in, say, the 1940s.

Sad, little man
August 20th, 2016, 07:38 PM
As 21kid said, imagine if we had a century of serious effort at development and improvement of electric cars like we've had for petroleum powered vehicles, electric cars might have been much more viable a long time ago.

Maybe, but I'm not so sure. We have been continuing to develop battery and motor technology for other applications for all this time. Perhaps if we had dedicated ourselves to electric vehicles all this time, there would have been more urgency to make better battery technologies, but I dunno, it's hard to say.

thesameguy
August 21st, 2016, 12:33 AM
But....

It's not like people just stopped making electric cars for no reason. Electric cars were initially easier to make, but they ran into logistic, technological, and functional problems that could not be overcome at the time. It's not like people didn't try, but it was still quicker to make more complicated, less well understood ICEs than to push BEV development. ICEs addressed the limitations of electric cars without introducing new challenges (that we were aware of at the time). There just wasn't a scenario where BEVS were a way forward. If for whatever reason ICEs simply could not exist, we'd be driving steam cars. If BEVs were literally the only forward, we would have spent the 20s, 30s, and possibly 40s figuring out how to go more 40 miles from home. How to move people at more than 25mph. Sticking with BEVs would have been an enormous roadblock to an innumerable other sciences and industries. Sure, maybe they'd be more advanced now, but a mind boggling number of other things would have been seriously hamstrung. All that time mankind was doing stuff would have been spent trying to figure out how to get to the next town at more than 25mph.

I wouldn't say all this stuff is bad. Maybe mass transit would have done better in this country or maybe we'd have paid more attention to the cities. But we'd probably also all have an extra 100 years of lead acid battery waste and maybe a shortage of lithium. So, you know, I think we did what we needed to do and everything's mostly ok. If we wanna play the "100 years of research" game, my vote would go to quantum physics and matter teleportation or maybe Face/Off machines - not BEVs.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLGD8g7pTfo

George
August 21st, 2016, 10:15 AM
Watched the whole video. Enjoyed it.