Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Tuesday, 18 March 2008 10:11
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
The website explains that the Detroit Electric’s original
cars could travel 211 miles on a charge – with technology and batteries
from 100 years ago! They note that “With today's technology we should
be able to go far beyond that.”
Detroit
Electric say they are finalizing plans to build an array of cars,
trucks and buses with the latest automotive technologies, so no matter
what happens with future models of the Toyota Prius, the Tesla
Electric Roadster and even GM’s ‘Volt’, itself due in a 2010 timeframe,
the 21st century push towards electric cars overtaking the polluting
technology of the combustion engine running on petrol, diesel, gas or
biofuel looks to finally be unstoppable.
Speaking of the Tesla Electric Roadster, this amazing electric car is also in the news, with
today marking the day the 2008 production of the Roadster finally goes into production.
Indeed, with any luck, the electric cars of tomorrow will be using
Stanford University’s “revolutionary nanowire battery delivers 10x the
charge of lithium-ion”, about which we published
an article recently.
According to the
CNET article, you would have paid anywhere from US $1,775 to US $2,375 for a 1917 model Detroit Electric.
Given
the fact the US dollar has lost more than 95% of its value since the
early 1900s, US $2000 back then was a massive amount of money that only
the super-rich could afford, hence the likes of Rockefeller, Ford,
Edison and others as headline customers.
CNET’s article also
notes that the car could travel “between 100km to 160km on a battery
charge, with a max speed of between 10km/h and 40km/h.”
So why
did the original Anderson Electric Car Company, makers of Detroit
Electric, go out of business - and what was one of their sales pitches
from the past, which still sounds fantastic today? Please read onto
page 3.
