Automakers love to lean into futuristic design features when creating EVs lately. Sleek edges, razor-thin headlights, head-up displays projected onto the windshield, they want to make sure you know full well that this is the next big thing. But electric cars date back to at least 1888, when the 1-hp Flocken Elektrowagen first hit 9 mph on a lead-acid battery. In fact, there was a point, around 100 years ago, when the automotive industry might have ditched fossil fuels entirely and gone all-electric.
Ford’s first electric car came along in 1914, and it was actually a battery-powered variant of the Model T. While this car never reached production, it does offer an interesting glimpse into what might have been, and helps to show that the electric car is an idea whose time is long overdue.
The 1914 Model T Mach-E
Back in the early 1900s, electric cars were not as uncommon a sight as you might guess. The Detroit Electric was a production car running entirely on battery power, with the Anderson Electric Car Company producing around 13,000 of them from 1907 to 1939. The stock battery was lead acid, while an Edison nickel-iron battery was offered for $600 (over $18,000 today, adjusting for inflation).
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Gasoline was the go-to fuel source around this time, but that wasn’t set in stone, and you still saw electric and even steam powered cars on city streets and country roads. Ford had bought a 1914 Detroit Electric for his wife, Clara, and Thomas Edison himself owned one. Henry Ford was the world’s largest automaker by this point, so it seemed like no big deal for him to announce an electric car and buy a plot of land near the Ford plant to mass-produce Edison’s nickel-iron batteries.
In a statement printed in the New York Times, Ford said “Within a year, I hope, we shall begin the manufacture of an electric automobile. I don’t like to talk about things which are a year ahead, but I am willing to tell you something of my plans.”
The first prototype, a sort of proof-of-concept build, was a small ladder frame with wire spoke wheels and a row of batteries under the seat, steered by a tiller. The model intended for production would essentially be a modified Model T, with the electric motor mounted under the cockpit, directing power to the rear axle. The car was intended to release for $500 (just under $16,000, today), but that would never come to pass.
Why Ford’s Future Wasn’t Electric (Just Yet)
The cancelation of the all-electric “Ford Flivver” project can ultimately be pinned to Henry’s prickly personality. Henry Ford looked to Thomas Edison as a mentor, and the whole point of building an electric Ford was to put the Edison batteries to use. Unfortunately, Edison’s batteries were less than ideal for Ford’s purposes.
On the plus side, Edison’s batteries had a long shelf life, and they could be recharged over and over again. On the other hand, they charged very slowly, their output was mediocre in comparison to lead-acid batteries, and they cost more than the car itself.
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At some point, Ford’s engineers swapped the nickel-iron batteries out with lead-acid, and Henry scrapped the whole project after burning a reported one and a half million dollars (around $47 million in 2024) on the idea. If he couldn’t use his buddy Edison’s batteries in the electric Ford, then he had no interest in pursuing the project at all.
All of this is to say that we actually came pretty close to driving electric Fords a full century ago, more than a century before the Mustang Mach-E had even hit the drawing board, and the automotive landscape today might look very different if that had come to pass. But Ford was less interested in changing the industry at that point than he was in promoting his mentor’s ideas to the public. The boys in the lab couldn’t figure out how to make Edison’s batteries more effective in powering Ford’s cars, so we never got to see a mass-produced electric Model T.
Vindicated, After Eighty Years?
|
Battery |
26 kWh nickel-metal hydride |
|---|---|
|
Power |
90 hp |
|
Torque |
149 lb-ft |
|
Transmission |
3:1 single-speed reduction |
|
Drivetrain |
Rear-motor, rear-wheel drive |
If you look at the long history of electric cars, it’s very stop-and-start. For instance, Jeep made an electric mail truck back in 1965, and then basically ignored the EV market for several decades to follow. It’s not hard to find examples of one-off electric cars, trucks, and SUVs that predate the current zero-emissions movement by thirty, forty, fifty years, or more.
Maybe the biggest false start we ever had in the push toward electricity would take place in the late ’90s, when Honda debuted the EV Plus, twenty years before the Prologue, and Ford introduced us to the Ford Ranger EV for the 1998 model year. In those days we were talking about everything from electric to solar-powered to cars that could run entirely on alcohol or salt water, and you could argue that the electric Ranger was actually one of the more conservative attempts at rethinking the modern automobile.
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The Ranger EV was built on the same light truck chassis as the late-90s model Ford Explorers, and, perhaps vindicating Henry Ford nearly a century later, most models ran on nickel-metal hydride batteries, not lead-acid.
Rather than leaning into any of the futuristic, cutting-edge characteristics of a battery-powered pickup, Ford wanted to create a seamless transition between driving an ICE-powered Ford Ranger XL and a Ford Ranger EV, even including a column shifter modeled after that of a conventional automatic transmission. You had positions for Park, Reverse, Neutral, Drive, and Economy, which would engage the regenerative braking and reduce the maximum speed.
History Repeating Itself?
Perhaps it’s an example of “those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat it,” but the reason why the Ranger EV did not spark an electric revolution has a lot to do with the battery packs. The Ranger’s nickel-metal hydride, or NiMH, batteries were difficult to charge in hot environments, they could lose capacity in cold environments, and they could potentially fail at around 25,000 miles, which will barely get the average truck driver two or three years of use. Essentially, you wanted a pickup battery to be rugged and durable, and these batteries were anything but.
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Ford’s electric revolution wouldn’t really start properly until the launch of the 2012 Ford Focus electric, built on the third-gen Focus, and launched with a 23 kWh lithium-ion battery pack, producing a range of 76 miles. We can’t say for sure that the Ford Flivver or the Ranger EV would have been smashing successes had they just gone with lithium-ion in the first place, but they at least might have gotten over their first major hurdles and had a fighting chance at changing the automotive world.
