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Time, again, for electric cars to take center stage

By G. Wayne Miller All-electric cars were creating excitement as the 2016 car show season began with the Consumer Electronics Show and, more recently, the Philadelphia Auto Show. With shows to come in Chicago, Toronto, Geneva, Beijing, and New York City, plus many smaller regional exhibitions, battery-powered vehicles will stay in the news.

By G. Wayne Miller

All-electric cars were creating excitement as the 2016 car show season began with the Consumer Electronics Show and, more recently, the Philadelphia Auto Show. With shows to come in Chicago, Toronto, Geneva, Beijing, and New York City, plus many smaller regional exhibitions, battery-powered vehicles will stay in the news.

It's an old story, though, dating to the automotive industry's infancy, when electrics competed with steam- and gas-powered vehicles for market share.

The electrics were formidable contenders. Although not as fast as the others, they were "noiseless, clean, simple, odorless," as a 1905 ad for the Columbus Buggy Co.'s electric runabout proclaimed. They started and ran instantly, not after a shoulder-wrenching hand crank or a frustrating wait as a boiler heated (and, sometimes, exploded). They cost about the same as steam and gas cars for similarly equipped models, and they looked just as pretty.

Two electric firms, Pope and Electric Vehicle Co., staged the largest exhibits in Madison Square Garden at the 1905 New York auto show, the nation's premier car event then; Ford and Olds Motor Works, the overall industry leader, were dwarfed by comparison.

The New York Times, among other publications, predicted a bright future for the clean machine. "There is a growing demand for small electric carriages," the paper wrote on Jan. 20. "Once so expensive, the improvements in recent years now render it possible to secure a neat runabout, with a single seat for two persons, for $900, while a trifle larger one, with a top, comes at $1,350."

At least 55 U.S. electric car makers (and more abroad) were in business at some point from 1895 to 1910. Five years later, nearly all were gone.

Some failed of their own inadequacies and market saturation. But two events in 1908 would prove crushing to the electrics in general: William C. "Billy" Durant's joining of Olds and Buick to create behemoth General Motors, and the first shipments of Henry Ford's revolutionary Model T.

Four years later, the electric starter was introduced. Gasoline was ever more available - but not electric power. Charging facilities were rare or nonexistent outside cities and spotty even within them; batteries lacked true juice. Claims of a 75-mile range on a single charge made by Columbus and other manufacturers were greatly exaggerated.

With their speed, cool designs, and the amenities of any modern vehicle, today's electrics would have amazed manufacturers of more than a century ago. They would not have been surprised by limitations on battery life and the relative dearth of charging stations, however. Add in gas now costing less than $2 a gallon, and the type of vehicle that Ford, GM, and their kind sold in 1908 - and still mostly sell - remains a better choice for many consumers, at least financially, given the greater ticket price of most electrics.

Just 72,303 battery-electric vehicles were sold in the United States in 2015, according to Sales Dashboard, a collaboration of HybridCars.com and Baum & Associates, a Michigan auto market research firm. That was a modest 6.6 percent increase over the year before - but only 0.4 percent of the 17.4 million total auto sales in America in 2015.

This is a pitiful number for a vehicle with such potential for reducing climate-changing carbon emissions - provided, of course, that their battery-charging electricity is generated from green sources.

Game plan? The federal government and the states should do more than provide tax credits and rebates to consumers for purchases of battery-powered vehicles: Following the lead of California, which has America's largest electric-car market, they must invest in greatly expanding the electric-vehicle infrastructure, starting with faster-acting and vastly more numerous charging facilities. They should spur development of superior batteries and electric-vehicle technologies, following the example of Nevada, which in 2014 approved tax breaks worth up to $1.3 billion for a Tesla battery plant and, last December, approved $335 million in incentives to lure new electric-car company Farady Future, backed by Chinese billionaire Jia Yueting, to the state. The resulting mass production would bring the price of a battery car down.

America created the Interstate Highway System under Republican President Dwight Eisenhower using a federal tax on petroleum fuel to pay for a percentage of construction costs. That tax, initially 3 cents a gallon, has remained at 18.4 cents a gallon for 23 years; it could be increased and the proceeds used not only for the electric infrastructure and manufacturing and research incentives, but also for repairing deteriorating roads and bridges used by all vehicles. Will Congress do it? Not in this election year, but conceivably in 2017 or beyond, depending on the new president and Congress. If the cost of conventional fuel remains low, which seems likely, adding a few pennies will cause little pain at the pump. And that would be politically palatable.

We all should root for GM's new Chevy Bolt, the new Ford Focus Electric, the forthcoming Tesla Model 3, and the other electrics in the headlines this winter. With aggressive support, these noiseless, clean, and odorless vehicles will contribute greatly to something most of us value: a healthier planet. Billy Durant and Henry Ford surely would applaud.

G. Wayne Miller is the author of "Car Crazy: The Battle for Supremacy Between Ford and Olds and the Dawn of the Automobile Age." gwmiller@providencejournal.com