The BBC makes a classic error in their chief environment correspondent’s new report by saying GM started electric mass vehicle development in 1990s (also failing to mention it was shutdown after 2002 by President Bush).

Here’s what they say:

Why electric cars will take over sooner than you think… The first crude electric car was developed by the Scottish inventor Robert Anderson in the 1830s. But it is only in the last few years that the technology has been available at the kind of prices that make it competitive.

That’s all wrong.

Sooner? I think electric cars are VERY late in taking over, especially since they were price competitive 100 years ago.

And look at the image caption in the BBC story:

Why is the BBC here so obviously off their rocker?

This EV1 was the first GM electric vehicle and it was launched in 1998?

No and No.

Not only was the EV1 obviously NOT GM’s first attempt to make an electric vehicle (for decades prior GM had made many electric vehicles due to favorable economics, all the way back to the early 1900s)… even this EV1 in the image itself had been “launched” long before 1998.

And I should also add here in 1997 that the AC Propulsion tzero technology (0-60 in 4.2 secs, 100 mile range) was so good that it was licensed (before being stolen) by a new car company that named itself… Tesla.

More to the point, AC Propulsion themselves will tell you that by 2003 their tzero achieved 0-60 mph in 3.6 seconds with a range up to 300 miles!

Sound familiar?

Tesla’s 2006 start was at best a loud mouthed knock off of the 1997 tzero, and thus a decade late.

President George Bush had ruthlessly killed the electric car market hoping to set back innovations (e.g. remove regulations, starving investments in new technology). CARB dropped its electric car mandate April 24, 2003 under these highly suspicious circumstances. In other words the AC Propulsion technology of 2003 (modern by even today’s standards) was announced just as the U.S. government did everything it could to make it disappear.

What should have been a huge revolution was politically silenced, which then setup rich investors to try and make it happen anyway.

Tesla raised money to capitalize upon the arrificial market collapse from oilmen with their thumb on the American vehicle industry; in 2006 Tesla basically pitched it could copy the 2003 version of 1997 tzero technology.

I wish more journalists understood this basic turn of events before they repeated the oft-told “innovation” lies about Tesla.

Tesla broke through American corruption by out-corrupting the corrupt. It never has been much more than a car badge slapped on engineering from someone else; usually a low quality rushed assembly of prior ideas that unnecessarily puts everyone on the road at higher risk.

So let’s back all this BBC nonsense and fluff out of the way.

Here’s the real history: GM mass-produced 682 electric trucks in 1912 with lead-acid and Edison nickel-iron batteries. That’s a lot for that time, which was long ago.

We’re talking first attempts right?

Apparently charging the popular GM electric vehicles back then looked something like this:

Moreover “the kind of prices that make it competitive” isn’t any kind of new story, since those started waaaay back in time.

By 1900, electric cars were at their heyday, accounting for around a third of all vehicles on the road. During the next 10 years, they continued to show strong sales.” By 1912, there were 38,843 on US roads.

Let me say that again with emphasis:

EV WERE A THIRD OF ALL VEHICLES ON THE ROAD IN 1900 AND SAW STRONG SALES FOR THE NEXT DECADE!

Here’s a really important point about these popular and price competitive electric cars in 1910: Women loved owning and driving them.

So much, in fact, that Clara Ford’s horribly racist and misogynist husband decided to drive them out with massive price cuts to collapse the market (under the false pretense of being competitive).

The infamous Henry Ford in 1914 announced the “Ford Electric” he would sell for $900 with a range of 100 miles (based on the Anderson “Detroit Electric”, which sold for around $3,000 at that time).

Clara Ford, wife of Henry Ford, drove this Detroit Electric. In the years before World War I many women chose electric cars because they started instantly without hand cranking and had no difficult-to-shift transmission. The superintendent of the Detroit Electric factory employed his daughter, Lillian Reynolds, to sell to women — including Clara Ford, who drove this car into the 1930s.

The following Detroit Electric brochure even spells out having 100-mile range in this very car that Ford was driving around (real world tests turned in double that range) while her husband claimed he could collapse the price around 2/3 (which would translate to a car for $25,000 in today’s terms) if he gutted the company by firing innovators, quitting manufacturing and claiming dumb assembly of parts could claim 1/3 value.

The news of 1914 reported “Detroit Electric is not overpriced — or even high priced” when Ford and Edison purchased them.

Another fun history fact about affordable electric cars then and now: Ford today will charge you basically the same $50,000 whether for a gasoline or electric variant of their F-150 truck.

To recap, in 1907 William Anderson started producing electric vehicles under the brand Detroit Electric. In 1909 it acquired the Elwell-Parker electric motor and controller manufacturer (considered the best available). In 1911 it offered an Edison nickel-iron battery option to replace its rechargeable lead-acid. The company was so successful in sales and engineering it was even owned in 1914 by Ford, Edison and several major automobile executives… manufacturing electric cars and home chargers all the way to the 1940s.

Think for a minute about the fact that artificially polluting a market to deny the true economics of an electric car might just be an entirely political move made by a particular group of American men who really didn’t want women to gain power through clean and decentralized technology.

I mean when an electric car stops, you stop paying for power consumption, for example. And electric cars don’t spew dangerous lead fumes and toxic noise into neighborhoods that everyone else has to pay to clean up for decades afterwards.

Fast forward now to the “revolution” in 1970s battery innovations. They were the very definition of very belated market response to loss of control in monopolized gasoline prices: panicked predictions of fuel prices going over $2/gal (prices had spiked from an average of $0.36/gallon — $1.75/gallon in today’s dollars — to $1.19/gallon in 1980 — $2.95/gallon in today’s dollars).

Yes, people in America used to go into a total panic at the realization gasoline is a centrally-controlled and planned system that could artificially reach… wait for it… $3.00/gallon.

“Americans’ fear turned a small interruption in supply into a major crisis. In truth, the major oil companies were able to shift around distribution in ways that should have minimized the impact in the 1970s. But panic took hold, and the rush to tank up compounded the situation.” …the response to the 1970s oil shocks gave the planet a life-saving head start in the struggle to avoid catastrophic climate change.

That kind of panic ties into the fact that modern affordable electric mass vehicle development really comes from 1940s energy scarcity issues (postwar Tokyo’s acute gasoline shortages coupled with an abundance of hydro-electricity), as I’ve written here before.

Fun history fact: hydro-power generated a full third of America’s electricity by 1940, and nearly 80% of power in the western states… and yet somehow Japan’s air force (after losing the world war) were tasked by America with creating the modern mass-produced electric car.

Anyway, it’s out of this foundation in real history that we should never forget that by 1980 the executives at GM were openly promising mass electric cars would be on the road in just 5 years, long pre-dating the EV-1.

G.M. is planning to put a mass-produced electric car on the road by the mid-1980’s. Alex Mair, vice president in charge of technical staffs, said that by 2020, 10 to 15 percent of G.M.’s total production will be electric vehicles. “We think we’re leading the world this time around,” Mr. Mair said.

This time around meant what decade…?

So, back to the horribly wrong BBC article, let’s just acknowledge that GM’s EV-1 was at least their third major attempt at promoting mass production of an electric car and came late.

Definitely NOT the first attempt.

Maybe I’m splitting hairs a bit on terminology, but it probably matters a lot if you care about not repeating mistakes of the past.

When GM displayed in 1990 their very poorly branded “Impact” electric car (alleged predecessor to their EV-1), at best we could call it a first GM model “designed to be an electric vehicle from the outset”.

But we just can’t avoid the fact so many other electric GM cars had been attempted before an EV-1.

The GM-based Silver Volt, for example, was a 1980 plug-in hybrid based on a Buick station wagon.

There even was a 1979 joint venture between the Department of Energy, GE and Chrysler called the Electric Test Vehicle (ETV-1).

Before the EV-1 came the ETV-1. Makes sense, I guess.

Watch the following 1980 TV archive footage with the cool 1978 GM Electrovette for what they officially sounded like to the public at that time (“…by the year 1990 GM says 10 out of 100 drivers could be behind the wheel of this kind of vehicle.”):

That’s right, a GM plan for mass-produced electric cars dates to at least 1976 as this one clearly shows.

BUT WAIT. The GM heritage center itself tells us that the 1970s aren’t early enough:

The Electrovair was developed in 1964 as a conversion of the popular Chevrolet Corvair. The engine and transmission were removed and replaced with electric system components. It had a pioneering 90 HP AC induction motor and a 450-volt silver-zinc battery. […] The Electorvair II was announced in 1966. It was more powerful than the Electrovair I with 115-HP and 532 volts. Its silver-zinc batteries enabled a top speed 80 MPH and a range 40-80 miles.

There’s even a video of that too. Here’s GM’s 1966 electric car, an upgrade from their 1964 model, where they end on a sour note:

I could do this all day. Here’s the 1969 GM XP 512E, where “E” clearly stands for electric:

Apparently charging GM electric vehicles in 1969 looked something like this:

These micro vehicles might look silly by today’s monster-truck standards of power-projection… yet someone took their Enfield E8000 ECC (Electric City Car) and updated the batteries to produce 1,000HP, posting a quarter-mile run at 12.56-seconds going over 101 mph!

When originally manufactured in 1974, the E8000 was equipped with 300 kg of lead-acid batteries for 96 volts, now Smith equipped his with 145 kg of li-ion batteries for 378 volts.

This wasn’t a GM, or even an American car. It was a design instigated by the United Kingdom Electricity Council in 1966 (perhaps aligned with the 1963 US Clear Air Act). I just mention it here because its design was so good it allegedly seriously alarmed California’s Governor: Ronald Reagan.

To be clear, all these modern attempts by GM to innovate in electric cars through the 1960s and 1970s were ruthlessly shut-down for purely political gain by the GOP under the thumb of the oil industry when Reagan became President in 1981.

And somehow nobody remembers any of the electric cars from these decades?

The BBC falsely calling an EV-1 the first attempt by GM… not only ignores an obvious reality in car history, it badly obscures how electric car innovations were AGAIN aggressively shut-down in the 2000s by President Bush… a sad repeat of America’s short-sighted right-wing party addiction to oil.

White House Joins Fight Against Electric Cars: The Bush administration went to court today to support the automobile industry’s effort to eliminate requirements in California that auto manufacturers sell electric cars.

Let me spell this out more clearly. Ronald Reagan in the 1960s led the GOP to carve out an exception in California to national clean air regulations so they could kill the electric car. Yet when Reagan unexpectedly became president in 1980s he flipped around to kill the electric car nationally, facing the awkward fact that California had been carved out and trying to keep the electric car alive.

This kind of soft flopping around wasn’t unusual for Reagan. He fought to ban guns in California so the police could more easily kill Black Americans, yet after becoming president he opposed bans on guns… so the police could more easily kill Black Americans. See the consistency within the contradiction?

Such hyper-political winds so very artificially manipulating markets and blocking innovation in America always has been the real problem stalling an inevitable arrival.

That, plus the sad fact that people seem to not learn history.

Did you even know Reagan tried to destroy electric cars, not to mention ban guns? Shame on the BBC for getting American history so wrong. They’re not even American so what’s their excuse for such ignorance?

Bonus history points: Here’s a poster with some obvious reasons from 1917 why inexpensive electric trucks make more sense than a highly-centralized and environmentally destructive model of gasoline that caused panics in the 1970s… all which still read true today (click to enlarge).

The Detroit Electric company in 1912 offered these contemporary-sounding thoughts on the subject in their brochure.

Electric delivery will supersede all other modes for city use, just as naturally as electric street railways, electric elevated railroads and electric locomotives for steam railroad terminals are taking the place of all other forms of locomotion. Wherever electricity has solved any problem, it has done so better than any other form of power. […] When the car stops, the power stops — and the expense for power. Detroit Electric commercial vehicles are noiseless, odorless… particularly appreciated by customers in all residential districts.

Or as the Smithsonian put it:

Come the turn of the 19th century, battery-powered machines were also entering into the fold; Ogden Bolton Jr. was issued a U.S. patent for his battery-powered bicycle in 1895.

We’re just now “entering the fold” like it’s 1895 again, thanks to mass electric car concepts of the 1940s.

Even those annoying “new” electric scooters are as old as the electric car.

A Danish Jaeger Corps (Special Ops Force) officer named Helge Meyer thought he could help with supply-chain issues of the early-1990s by creating a… Bitchin’ Camaro (ala Dead Milkmen). Ooops, I mean Ghost Camaro (although Meyer oddly referred to the whole thing as being God’s Rambo, which sounds like a 16 year-old white kid from Minnesota spending dad’s money).

Meyer pitched US military leaders in charge of humanitarian efforts in Bosnia on a small and “fast” car for him to drive about, given the typical slow-moving military supply-chain.

He asked the US to sponsor him, and showed up with a 1979 Chevrolet car for the Americans to upgrade.

What else was from 1979…I mean besides gasoline for $0.75/gallon?

The first “Mad Max” movie was in 1979, starring a Ford with an engine that a character describes as “…last of the V-8s. She sucks nitro”.

And Mad Max was only a few years before “Knight Rider” became an American TV show centered on high-tech communications stuffed into a sports car.

One can guess Meyer was a fan of both.

For his project he had US military engineers juice his 1979 Camaro stock 5.7-liter V8 engine from 175 horsepower to 220 (more like a Camaro V8 of the early 1970s). Then they added nitrous for a double jump to 440.

Very Mad Max.

Then the US engineers added radar-defeating paint “leftover” from F-117 allocation, giant infrared driving lights, run-flat foam-filled tires, a ground-to-air radio system for aircraft communication, kevlar doors and trunk, steel panels under and around the driver, body-heat sensors, fire extinguishers, night vision systems and a mine-clearing blade. Plus a personal armor system (PASGT) vest and helmet.

Very Knight Rider.

Indeed, DriveTribe called it “combining [Knight Rider] with Mad Max in order to save lives”.

One thing I’ve never seen discussed is why the engine wasn’t quieter, or even silent. In some cases story-tellers say they believe people felt joy when they could hear the loud V-8 coming, yet that seems completely counter to everything “ghost” about it.

Missed opportunity in the 1990s for US military engineers to produce a high-performance electric car to save lives like the 1980 Lektrikar II, if you ask me. After all, while electricity could still be found in Bosnia how was a gas-guzzling thing like this Camaro supposed to recharge its nitrous or avoid stopping for gas? Apparently it couldn’t go very far.

In 2006 I wrote about fast quiet special operations engines, when I briefly profiled the 1999 US Military RST-V Hybrid Electric Diesel: the “Shadow“. It had an electric-only mode with three huge “ghost” benefits: super fast, yet the heat and sound emissions were reduced to almost nothing.

I guess anytime someone brings up the “ghost Camaro” car story, it could be a good conversation starter to ask why high profile emission signatures were favored over silent and clean options available.

One of my readers has sent me a photo showing a Nazi t-shirt proudly being worn next to the car in a fashion shoot (pun not intended), from another version of the story.

This photo indeed explains the childish “God’s Rambo” mindset I alluded to above.

The “Aloners MC” is a German organization that flies the loser US Confederate battle flag as their logo. This is well known in Germany as symbolizing support for extreme right-wing terror groups (Nazism), given a Swastika flag is banned.

The Aloners also fly a 1% symbol next to their loser US Confederate battle flag, to symbolize they see themselves as above the law and irresponsible — thus “God’s Rambo” is reference to extreme right-wing politics, refusing to follow any laws.

Bottom line is the car wasn’t a ghost, it emitted a huge signature on purpose to let people know its presence from far away, and the man driving it can no sooner call himself a humanitarian wearing an Aloners MC shirt (promoting human slavery), than if he wore a Nazi swastika.

Here’s a sobering thought. At the same time as this guy’s operation, I knew personally some anti-fascist Germans who repeatedly drove a small diesel Volkswagen unmodified into Bosnia and survived. You’ll never hear about them or see them. They seem more like the real “ghost” deal than a show-boating Nazi club member infatuated with power unregulated, trying to emulate movies and television.

In terms of scale, UN humanitarian efforts in Bosnia were recorded as the largest operation in their history.

UNHCR managed to deliver some 950,000 metric tonnes of humanitarian assistance to some 2.7 million beneficiaries in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995. It became UNHCR’s largest humanitarian operation ever. […] By the end of 1995 there were over 250 international humanitarian organisations operating under the UNHCR ‘umbrella’. The only major humanitarian organisation to operate outside the UNHCR framework was ICRC. […] By the end of 1995 there were more than 3,000 people from over 250 humanitarian organisations carrying valid UNHCR ID cards [and] over 2,000 vehicles from more than a 150 humanitarian organisations driving around Bosnia with UNHCR registration plates.

The US AirForce put it like this:

During the three-and-a-half year operation, the 21 nations supporting [UN] Provide Promise flew 12,895 supply missions (4,197 by USAF) and delivered 160,536 metric tons (62,801.5 by USAF) of humanitarian goods to Sarajevo. In addition, the USAF airlifters flew more than 2,200 airdrop sorties across Bosnia.

Here’s another sobering thought. Some journalists at the same time as the Camaro story started running aid on their own initiative and ended up building a hugely successful humanitarian organization.

People in Need organization was established in 1992 by a group of Czech war correspondents who were no longer satisfied with merely relaying information about ongoing conflicts and began sending out aid. It gradually became established as a professional humanitarian organization striving to provide aid in troubled regions and support adherence to human rights around the world. Throughout the 25 years of its existence, People in Need has become one of the biggest non-profit organizations in Central Europe.

Now that’s an impressive legacy; Šimon Pánek and Jaromír Štětina setup a system lasting to this day. Compare that with a gas-guzzling orange parade float paid for by American taxpayers that has been in some random guy’s garage after a very brief (albeit useful) stint down range.

So I hereby propose future stories about Helge Meyer use a little more context to point out the wild inconsistencies to his story:

• Felt he needed US government to engineer an extremely expensive vehicle just for him and protect him with communications to networks, yet calls himself “alone”.
• Made a car obnoxiously loud to alert people of his movements, yet promoted it as a “ghost”.
• Said he did it as a warrior for god, yet poses for publicity in a white-supremacist t-shirt that violates most basic (modern) religious principles.

If the measure of the story is someone who did something selfless with technology in order to help others, there are surely far better examples than this hollow-sounding one.

Would you buy a 1980 Datsun electric car?

Let me explain why such a car would exist in America, by telling you an obscure and old story that nobody really remembers anymore, and as far as I can tell has never been told in full before (given so many records/pieces are missing).

The New York Times in February 1981 boldly claimed the electric car was returning to America.

THE internal-combustion engine may have been king of the road for the last 70 years, but as a result of the gasoline hysteria that has struck the United States twice in the last decade, its chief competitor – the electric car – is again being seriously considered as an alternative.

Now here’s the big clue about where Datsun comes into play: GM and Gulf and Western are mentioned in the same sentence as “making commitments”.

“A whole new stage is being set for the electric car,” said John Makulowich, executive director of the Electric Vehicle Council, a trade association. “Major corporations like General Motors and Gulf and Western are making commitments to electric-vehicle engineering.” He attributed this in part to legislation giving financial aid and other incentives to research and development in this area.

Dozens of large and small companies are investing time and money in battery and electric-vehicle development, while hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals are tinkering in garages and laboratories to find an answer to America’s energy needs in a world of shrinking gasoline supplies. The answer, some think, could lie in the past.

Ah, well if the answer to electric cars lies in the past… will 1981 prove to be the answer for electric cars in 2021? Probably, but NYT wants us to go back even further in time since 1981 was current (pun not intended) for them back then.

By around 1910, one out of every three cars or trucks on American roads was there under electric power. But by 1920, Ford had sold nearly 10 million assembly-line-built gasoline-powered cars.

10 million gasoline-powered cars sounds like a lot of output until you look at the number of anti-Semitic hate propaganda and disinformation rags that Ford published.

I mean talk about “selling” a lot… Hitler even gave Ford a medal after taking millions of dollars to deliver products to American military, disappearing with it and instead showing up as ally of Nazi Germany!

I’m not kidding. That’s real, Ford’s abject failure to deliver as promised is even recorded in US Congressional debates.

Anyway, setting all that dark and serious history aside, here’s my absolute favorite part of this NYT article. I have to screenshot it so you’ll believe me:

1796?! Wat.

Given the Department of Energy (DoE) was created in 1977 by President Carter (August 4 Department of Energy Organization Act abolishing the Federal Energy Administration and Energy Research and Development Administration) it seems very unlikely that the year 1796 is anything but a typo that still hasn’t been corrected.

I mean if America had electric vehicle commitments all the way back to 1796… hooo boy talk about this country being late to deliver on promises of freedom!

Speaking of promises, GM was literally saying in this 1981 article that they soon would be leading the world in electric cars. No, really they were saying how electric was going to be like a whopping 10 percent of their fleet 40 years into the future.

G.M. is planning to put a mass-produced electric car on the road by the mid-1980’s. Alex Mair, vice president in charge of technical staffs, said that by 2020, 10 to 15 percent of G.M.’s total production will be electric vehicles. “We think we’re leading the world this time around,” Mr. Mair said.

Someone could have stopped Mr. Mair right there and replied “10% is the opposite of leading the world, and a 40 year timeline is pathetic…just say never.”

Yeah, that didn’t turn out anything like what GM said. GM and electric car still are like saying oil and water.

But here is where the story gets really interesting, in two parts.

First, news of a breakthrough vehicle being developed by “Gulf and Western Industries” and second, calling out a Datsun employee driving an electric car around Los Angeles.

Earlier in 1980, Gulf and Western Industries announced a zincchloride battery system that David N. Judelson, the company’s president, called “a major achievement in the world of high technology – perhaps one of the most meaningful developments since the turn of the century.” The company said that vehicles powered with its battery had traveled 55 miles per hour for more than 150 miles on a single charge and that the battery system had a life cycle of more than 1,400 recharging cycles, or 200,000 miles.

[…]

Art Spinella, who works in public relations for Datsun in Los Angeles, has driven a converted Renault electric car since “the scare of ’73.” He said he just got tired of waiting in long gas lines. Powered by lead-acid batteries, the four-speed, late-60’s-model conversion cost just $600, and will run over 70 miles per hour and travel just over 60 miles before he has to recharge it. “People follow me off the expressway to ask what it is,” Mr. Spinella said, “They sometimes don’t believe what they just saw when I tell them it’s electric.” “Yes,” he added. “They work.”

Did the Datsun guy really plug a Renault (pun not intended)?

And now back to the point of this blog post, the 1980 Datsun electric car for sale.

A campaign called “Yes, they work” isn’t the best one I’ve ever seen. Yet such a definitive statement by Datsun PR in 1981 should have gotten a LOT more attention.

Apparently 1,200s Nissan vehicles without combustion engines were purchased by the US government under the 1970 Clear Air Act (with the 1976 Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Research, Development, and Demonstration Act) to make electric cars for power companies and municipality workers; eventually these vehicles ended up in the hands of “Lectra Motors” of Las Vegas.

Let me just stop here to point out right now that the Department of Energy official history of this period is provably false and misleading.

…vehicles developed and produced in the 1970s still suffered from drawbacks compared to gasoline-powered cars. Electric vehicles during this time had limited performance — usually topping at speeds of 45 miles per hour — and their typical range was limited to 40 miles before needing to be recharged.

That is just not true. “Typical range” and “usually topping” are weasel words because they’re talking averages, hiding the fact that cutting-edge advances of that day proved far, far better performance.

Here’s a late 1970s Lectra 400 brochure blowing away those deflated numbers (top speed over 65 mph, and 70 mile range, both far more than necessary in urban environments).

Let me explain with some more history.

The relationship between all these parties in the late 1970s might sound strange to the modern ear until you roll way back to the end of WWII and consider one of Nissan’s first products under occupation by Allied forces was an electric car.

In 1947, the company succeeded in creating a prototype 2-seater truck (500-kg load capacity) with a 4.5-horsepower motor and a new body design. It was named “Tama” after the area where the company was based. Its top speed was 34 km/h (21 mph). Next, the company created its first passenger car. With two doors and seating for four, it boasted a top speed of 35 km/h (22 mph) and a cruising range of 65 km (40 miles) on a single charge.

In other words, what the Department of Energy was claiming to be 1970s limitations were really from the 1940s! By the 1970s the new electric cars were capable of 70 mph and 70 mile range, far exceeding electric car requirements of that time.

To put it another way, context matters. Tokyo in 1945 had been burned to the ground (over 50% destroyed by months of firebomb raids) and industrial production let alone gasoline was non-existent.

Engineers from a Japanese Aircraft company in Tokyo were hired into Nissan and set about designing an electric car that would restart their country’s infrastructure and commerce.

They immediately put into production a car that could run off hydro-electricity from the mountains outside devastated Tokyo. Electricity infrastructure repairs meant production jumped nearly 55% right after war ended and here you can see hydro’s stability:

Even manufacturing of the car itself was supposedly designed to run on excess electricity in the immediate after-war years. Sure, the car was limited, but it was aircraft engineers redeployed to civilian needs and delivering something where there had been nothing.

There are a lot of “airplane-engineers must have built this” innovation moments when looking at a Tama, especially when you see a battery refuel concept of Nissan in 1947 giving drivers a fast swap on both sides like reloading wings for bombing runs:

Military engineers designing electric cars after WWII…hold that thought.

Now back to all the fancy sounding language from GM about leading the world in electric vehicles. Remember that? Instead GM used its giant budget to buy a majority stake of small but very plausible emerging electric car companies in Las Vegas to shut them down completely, allegedly even destroying records (if you know of any Lectra files, please let me know).

Any guesses why the Nissan electric car development with the US evaporated in 1981? Ronald Reagan.

It doesn’t get mentioned much, but in 1981 the Reagan Administration asked Japanese automakers to impose a “voluntary export restraint” (VER), which capped at 1.68 million the number of cars Japan could send to the United States each year. Reportedly, this was under threat of an outright tariff, but the VER accomplished just about the same thing.

Thus GM and Reagan ruined an early emerging success story involving Nissan and US government from 1979-1981 — thousands of cars were very briefly released for Gulf and Western (WRI), which were transitioned into LectraMotors run by Albert Joseph Sawyer (per his obituary from 2012).

After moving to Las Vegas in 1960, [the Navy veteran] worked for [Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier defense contractor] as an electrical engineer. In 1974, he made his first electric car. After retiring from EG&G in 1978, he formed LectraMotors to mass produce electric cars. He was a true visionary and pioneer in the electric car industry. Some cars are on the road to this very day.

Here’s how a US government report put it in 1979, with only a brief mention of testing the Lektrikar II, which at that time was still WRI:

And here’s a promotional video for the “advanced Zinc Chloride energy storage system” that boasted of $27 million in US government funding:

Did I say military engineers designing electric cars after WWII? Responding to a Japanese energy crisis in 1946 had quite a lot in common with responding to an American energy crisis in 1976, although I don’t see anyone make the obvious connection here from Nissan’s aeronautical engineers to EG&G’s…

EG&G jobs near Las Vegas meant something rather special. I didn’t find Albert Sawyer’s name on a 1967 drawing from EG&G “Special Projects” team, yet the imagery depicts a certain sentiment about the world for top engineering teams when the CIA terminated their Operation OXCART (SR-71 Blackbird).

Think about the Japanese engineers who built planes, shifting after defeat in WWII to making electric cars, giving those to engineers in America who were shifting from a company making the SR-71 to a new company to mass produce and represent cutting-edge electric cars.

Instead of “Yes, it works” perhaps the PR guy from Datsun could have said something like “If engineers working on our new 310 model can build a real-life R2-D2 astral navigation system for a top-secret long-range, high-altitude, Mach 3+ strategic reconnaissance aircraft, just wait until you see what they can do for the electric car”.

And so we come to the conclusion of this post.

One of these rarest of rare American cars sold by an ex-EG&G engineer’s company Lectra still exists today in Santa Cruz, California because… of course.

The car originally was badged as Datsun (US brand-name for Nissan) 310 Lektrikar II.

Nobody knows how many existed. Again, it is believed GM intentionally destroyed records during the Reagan Administration to cheat history of these emerging electric car projects.

This Lektrikar II has been “modified” over the years but fundamentally it’s always been a fine vehicle by even today’s standards.

Weirdly you will find no mention of any of this real history on Wikipedia’s retelling of electric car history, let alone any other “authoritative” versions of electric car company history in America. It’s almost impossible to find any mention of one at all anywhere.

The surviving Lektrikar II started with eighteen 6V golf-cart batteries (US Battery US-145 Lead-Acid Flooded with 7 front, 11 rear), and replaced them with a simpler array of nine 82-pound Trojan 1275MV automobile 12V Lead-Acid Flooded with 4 front, 5 rear.

The motor is a Prestolite 7.2 inch Series Wound DC 22 HP, with a 4-speed drivetrain and clutch.

And the controller is said to be a Curtis 1221C MOSFET transistor Technology, 15,000 cycles per second, 400 Amps.

It’s for sale… but really the story is that in 1981 the Datsun PR guy was telling people that converting his daily driver car to electric (for 60 mile range capable of 70 mph) cost around $600 and GM was telling the world they would be the leaders in this market while working behind the scene to shut it all down.

More photos: