Where’s the “Spark” in Electric Car Design?

Whether the automobile is a hybrid, a plug-in hybrid, or an all-electric, demand for them will continue to rise as gas prices fall and consumers look for methods to save money at the pump.

Since people are becoming more interested in electric cars, we are looking at where this technology has been and where it is going. Join us as we learn about the history of the electric car and go back in time. If you are looking forward to excelling at car designs, Check out Biw Fixture Design Course.

How The Electric Came to Being

It’s hard to say which person or country came up with the idea for the electric car. Instead, the first electric car was made possible by a series of inventions in the 1800s, like the battery and the electric motor.

Early in the 20th century, inventors in Hungary, the Netherlands, and the United States, including a blacksmith from Vermont, started toying with the idea of a battery-powered vehicle and made some of the first small-scale electric cars. 

Around the same time, British inventor Robert Anderson made the first crude electric carriage. However, French and English inventors didn’t make the first practical electric cars until the second half of the 19th century.

The Electric Car’s Early Rise and Fall

To understand why electric cars were so popular around 1900, you need to know how the personal car developed and what other choices were out there.  But as the American economy improved, people turned to the newly invented motor vehicle, which could run on steam, gasoline, or electricity.

Steam had been used to power factories and trains for a long time. In the late 1700s, some of the first vehicles that moved on their own used steam. It took until the 1870s for this technology to be used in cars. Steam vehicles took a long time to start up, and they needed to be refilled with water.

The other thing that changed electric cars was the announcement in 2006 that Tesla Motors, a small Silicon Valley company, would start making a luxury electric sports car that could go more than 200 miles on a single charge. 

In 2010, Tesla got a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office to set up a factory in California. The company paid back the loan nine years early. In the short time since then, Tesla’s cars have gotten a lot of praise, and the company has grown to be California’s most significant auto industry employer. After Tesla’s announcement and subsequent success, many big car companies sped up work on their electric cars.

Conclusion

It’s hard to say where electric cars will go in the future, but they have a lot of potentials to make the future greener. Suppose we switched all light-duty vehicles in the U.S. to hybrids or plug-in electric vehicles using the technology we have now. We could cut our reliance on oil and cut carbon pollution from transportation by 20%. Don’t miss out on the Plastic Product Design Course in Mumbai.