Sunday, January 9, 2011

Vintage Electric: Early electric car from Oregon

There's a lot of talk about electric cars these days, but really, they're nothing new. Electric cars have been around since the early part of the 1900s, but the gasoline engine ended up becoming more popular.

My neighbor, John (who has a great Studebaker Hawk, by the way), came up to me the other day with a photo of the car above, and the photo was dated 1920. He wondered if I might be interested in it for my blog. John said the photo was indeed from 1920, and this was an electric car here in Oregon. I'm not sure if the car was in his family or if it was a friend of the family's. Regardless, this is an electric vehicle.

A quick Google search for electric cars from the '20s yielded Detroit Electric, a company that offered cars in this time frame. Many of the vehicles looked identical to the above photo.

According to the Wikipedia site, a Detroit Electric car was advertised to have an 80 mile range, but one test yielded more than 200. Granted, the top speed was only about 20 mph. Hey, beats a horse and buggy! It's cool that this electric car was here in Oregon this early. We tout ourselves has having such advanced technologies, but nearly 100 years ago they were running electrics! Granted, lots has changed, but still.

Pretty neat old photo of a neat old car. Thanks for the photo, John!

No comments: