Happy Thursday, all! Today we’ll once again be looking at an engineering marvel that was well ahead of its time. As we all know, hybrid cars have been increasing in market share exponentially over the past 10 years. But the history of the hybrid dates back to well before the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight of the late 1990s. Its roots date back over a hundred years, when a famous Austrian engineer started tinkering with mixed forms of automobile propulsion systems.
Professor Ferdinand Porsche was a busy man at the turn of the century. By the time he was 23 he had already unveiled the Lohner-Porsche, one of the world’s first battery-powered cars. (Yes, electric cars have been around since the 1890s. Is your mind blown? Because mine is.) Ferdinand’s hub batteries were attached directly to the wheels and powered the car without any need for a combustion engine. Designed to race, the vehicle was hindered by its 4,000 lb batteries and only one model was ever produced despite gaining worldwide recognition at the Paris World Exhibition in 1900.
Back at the drawing board, the professor decided that the only viable way to have electricity power a car is to combine it with a standard combustion engine, leading to the world’s first hyrbrid car. The Semper Vivus was born with two standard combustion engines and a redesign of his battery hub on each of the front wheels. However, this design wasn’t still exactly what consumers were looking for; it was again on the heavy side and potential buyers were put off by its steering problems and bare design.
Rethinking the concept one more time, Mr. Porsche ditched the second engine and doubled the number of batteries. The Lohner-Porsche Mixte used a powerful (25-hp) Daimler engine and a lighter body. Sales of the jaw-droppingly expensive car boosted his morale and its lack of flaws led him to compete in the 1902 Excelberg Rally, where he took the top prize for its class. The car continued to receive publicity as the professor was invited to be a guest chauffeur for Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose death 10 years later sparked the Great War.
Although things were looking exceedingly positive for the professor and his inventions, the massive production costs and low sales forced him to end their production in 1905. The chassis of the vehicle continued to be a hit, but only 11 models of the hybrid version were ever sold.
In 2007, German engineers attempted to recreate the Semper Vivus version of the car, which was completed a few months ago. It premiered at the 2011 Geneva Motor Show and can now be seen at Porsche’s museum in Stuttgart.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: Professor Porsche accomplished all this without any formal education.
Enjoyed what you read? Check out all whole compendium of Historical Thursdays!
Pictures and Information courtesy of: Wikipedia and IB Times.
As always, if YOU have an idea for a Historical Thursday, let me know at thereifixedit@gmail.com
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Electrics in the 1890 get you mind blown?
The first car to ever drive over 100km/h was on April 29 or May 1, 1899. It was electric. (google “jamais contente”)
In 1906, a steam car set a world record of 127 mph. It remained unbroken for over a hundred years.
I’m pretty sure the world speed record of 127mph didn’t last until 2006?
Perhaps the record for a steam propelled vehicle lasted a until 2006 simply because the real pursuers of speed ditched the technology.
Because in 2006 there weren’t any cars capable of 128mph…
Um…wow. I hope you were kidding. The folks over at NASCAR would be surprised.
Steam-powered cars, you git.
Well it’s not a very impressive record if its only for steam cars.
I’ll let you beat it with 128 mph without helmet, seatbelt or roll cage on tubed tires that probably didn’t have metal belts (gotta check when that was invented).
*takes you for a ride in the £1000 commuting jalopy I came to work in today, built in 2001 and bought by me in ’09, that I’ve had up to 135 on the clock*
And that’s with the second smallest / third fastest engine in a range of five. Plus I had my ass soundly whipped by a 5~6 year old Audi whilst pulling 110-120mph a few days ago.
Would you like to reconsider?
Cool story
So the moral of the story is that we don’t need college?
stupid email
the moral of the story is that you don’t need college if you’re a genius.
College doesn’t teach you how to start your own company and invent things. You’re probably better off studying under a mentor for both of those. It’s less about being a genius than about being motivated and having the correct (not the traditional) education.
is it just me or does your avatar/pic thingy sort of look like a swastika?
Awesome, so not only did the hybrids of the past look as stupid as the ones on the market today, but idiots are investing in droves to support logistically infeasible and unsupportable ideas, a fact known for a LONG time.
Good job.
BTW, all you electric car lovers out there, where do you think electricity comes from? The rare earth materials used in batteries? Ever wonder about the waste stream generated by those batteries?
Here’s a lesson in entropy for all of you who can’t see through the smug.
It takes energy to produce electricity. This we all know. Most of that comes from coal.
It takes energy just to move the electricity from the plant to your home.
Energy is lost stepping the power down to voltages used in homes.
A HUGE amount of energy is lost charging a battery.
A large amount of the tiny remaining fraction is lost discharging the battery.
By the time electricity is generated, moved to your home, stored in your car, sent to the motor, and finally to the ground, I’m willing to bet that the modern electric car is the most inefficient idea ever concocted by idiots.
I’d like to see the ratio of potential energy in coal to HP produced by electric, and the ratio of potential energy in oil to HP produced by an ICE.
Not to get all rational on the new world religion.
It is incredibly inefficient. But you know what is even more inefficient by about 2x? The internal combustion engine driven car.
Ehhh…. In a hybrid, the internal combustion engine is used to generate electricity.
The modern hybrids are parallel hybrids, which mean that both the internal combustion engine and electic engine can be used as means of propulsion (Either one of them or both at the same time).
The Lohner Porsche’s were serial hybrids. The internal combustion engine only generated electricity, the electric engine alone took care of propulsion. Advantages: no complicated gearbox. The same system is used in diesel electic locomotives.
Don’t make sh*t up. It only further degrades an almost depleted credibility of you fools.
We’re not the ones making s**t up.
The electric motor is a lot more efficient than you’re making it out to be. Just think about the ICEs efficiency vs. the electric motor. The ICEs crankshaft must rotate 540 degrees before producing power since the combustion only occurs once in two rotations, a lot of the rotation of the engine is wasted in drawing in and compressing the fuel, and expelling the waste. Now look at the electric motor, as soon as electricity is applied you get the fullest potential of torque, and it is applied constantly throughout the 360 degrees of rotation. Also, it takes alot of energy to get the gasoline in our engines from crude oil in the ground. Just think about what all goes into drilling, refining and shipping the fuel all over the world, when electricity can be produced right in your own back yard with solar cells.
I’d also like to see a chart or a survey or something detailing how much energy is used converting raw resources into movement in vehicles with electric motors vs. ICEs
Go to school, will ya´?
Wow, good job of copy & paste there wingnut-bot!
You are forgetting a “very little” thing. The efficiency of a power plant (combustion) doubles the efficiency of an ICE.
I have to concede that as long as we get the most of our electric power from burning stuff, it’s better to burn it in our “little motors”.
Ah, you forgot to complain about the worst thing that electric cars have, and that’s mileage. But… How many times do you need to drive longer than 100 miles? I don’t think they’re enough to justify having an ICE car.
The problem isn’t so much the range, but the amount of time it takes to charge. I hear people retort that “you can run out of gas in an ICE too.” all the time, but the simple fact is: In a gas car, all you have to do is get a gallon of fuel to get it to the pump. In an electric car, you have to get the car towed or something, and wait a few hours for it to recharge.
A turbine-powered serial hybrid is long overdue. Chrysler, make it happen! (they’re the only car company that has any experience with turbines.)
Not completely true. GM used to own Allison. The transmission people also made thousands of turbines. Allison turbines have been used in Helicopters for 50 years. Allison also made turbines for aircraft (lockheed Electra). Buick made Jet engines for aircraft also. Turbines are very “dirty” though. Lots of NOX emissions.
Uh…not quite. Modern gas turbines’ NOx and SOx emissions are much lower per unit of power generated than those of gasoline or diesel engines, because they run hotter. That is why all the cruise lines are installing GE LM2500s on their ships for use in maneuvering in and out of port. That’s also one reason why many stationary peak power plants use GTs.
There is the whole efficiency thing, though…that of GTs is somewhere between a diesel and a steam plant.
90% of my drives are over 100 miles, at highway speeds. Who among the various Federal agencies will I have to badger in order to beg for a waiver when ICE vehicles are outlawed in a few years?
I will need it too, my commute to work is 45 miles each way. mostly highway. No lil leafy for me either.
Be carefull. I am not a huge fan of the hybrid myself, but when talking efficiency the electric motor is way better. Yes electricity comes from fossil fuels, but the larger the scale of energy production, the more efficient it becomes. When you do the fossil fuel energy conversion, it is well over 100 mpg.
To me there are other real issues. First, The batteries. Their lifespan is not long enough to offset the fuel savings. Also battery disposal is an issue. Lithium ion batteries are toxic. Second I don’t like when the federal government gets involved by subsidizing hybrids. If it was a good enough idea, people would pay for it. Any ways more on that later, but check out drclarkjensen.com. He wrote an article on this stuff so I don’t have to.
While there are flaws with the method of powering an electric car, the difference between that electric car and it’s gasoline powered brethren is the potential. An electric car currently may depend on coal, but if you say, erected a (currently it would require a large one) wind turbine, you could power your electric car for free, with greater efficiency, without modifying your car. Most of the problems you discuss come from generating the electricity, which can be done with alternative methods.
Electric car…potential…I get it! B^)
Electricity can come from all sorts of places, just because a lot of comes from coal/etc now doesn’t mean it will the future. Personally I think solar power will become much more important in the next few decades.
Imagine if the roof of every building had solar panels on it. They can make solar panel shingles that look pretty much like normal shingles.
The main thing is, it’s a lot easier to upgrade where electricity comes from than what our vehicles use. So switch to hybrid/etc now and upgrade the power plants later.
> I’m willing to bet that the modern electric car is
> the most inefficient idea ever concocted by idiots.
I don’t think you fully appreciate the quality level of the world’s idiots. Just in the last hour I read an idea someone concocted that involved dealing with flooding on the Mississippi by pumping the water from there to, of all places, California. Oh, yeah, and just in case that by itself isn’t crazy enough for you, they wanted the US Federal government (“Efficiency? Didn’t we delegate that to a subcommittee three years ago?”) to build and operate the pipeline. I remind you, this is only the most inefficient idea I have run across in the last *hour*.
Let’s settle this argument with actual facts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_conversion_efficiency
George Washington Carver and Henry Ford worked together to develop one of the first biofuels ninety years ago. It’s amazing that the patents are still viable in the US after all this time. Corn biofuel was also patented at the same time.
How is it that countries like South Korea, Germany, and China have been producing diesel engines that get between 60-70 mpg for the last 20 years, but the US can’t? We want too many gadgets (AC) on our cars? We want a lot of power? Nancy Pelosi sponsored a bill to push increased mpg minimums from 2005 back to 2032? Not sure, but we need to figure it out.
Steam cars were around long before battery cars, but it’s cool to know about Mr. Porsche’s car.
Emmissions. The vast majority of vehicles in Europe are diesel. Here in the US, the emissions schemes are set up such that it’s extremely difficult to get a diesel engine on the market. Particulates are the big thing on diesels, it’d be nice to switch my Subaru to their diesel boxer, but they haven’t got it certified in enough states yet.
That’s not exactly right. They’re getting 60-70mpg with pretty low emissions mostly because they exchange power for efficiency. I had a 40+mpg Sentra in the 80′s that had 80hp. You can’t show me a four seat car in the US that has less than 120hp. That’s where the efficiency lies in European cars… that and they’re smaller because Europeans generally aren’t massive fat asses.
The power difference is due to the fact that new cars in general have ballooned in weight thanks to safety restrictions. New cars NEED 120 hp just to haul the extra 500 pounds+ added by all the mandatory safety crap.
Apples to apples:
Go to a Ford European website, check the Fiesta’s engines.
The biggest one is the only one they market in the US. The rest of the car is identical.
You can have a 1.25 litre Fiat turbodiesel with 105hp, from the factory, if you like… or a 1.6 litre Renault with 130hp. Their petrol engines claim even better power/capacity figures, and these are being fitted even to quite small cars now.
Even the dinky TwinAir in the Fiat 500 manages a healthy 85hp, but claims the lowest emissions/best economy of any petrol-powered car – even beating the Smart… at least, on the official tests. That engine is 875cc … it produces better than 20% more power than a small-ish family car (with US spec “economy” 1600cc engine) I used to own, but with significantly better emissions/economy even though it’s only 150kg or so lighter and probably no more aerodynamic.
Now consider that they regularly fit 1400~1700cc versions of these petrol engines and 1800~2200cc versions of the diesels to their larger, US style cars… and thanks to clever trickery they don’t often consume even 50% more fuel, let alone almost 2x. There’s no excuse.
And just how much power do you need anyway? 45~50hp will get you up past 90mph, which will get you a ticket even in Texas and be pushing your luck in Poland and Dubai (the states with the world’s highest posted limits – at 87mph), and with reasonable acceleration so long as you keep your foot planted to the floor and the revs up (such powerplants may be better suited to a series or at least mild parallel hybrid). Twice that will get you an approx 10 second 0-60 (an acceleration that will have your passengers complaining and feeling queasy if you do it too often, and give you plenty of shove for merging into fast traffic, or between lanes with one flowing at 55 and the other at 80+) and quite good pulling power for utility work. Anything much above that, if your car doesn’t weigh an excessive amount, should really be the preserve of sports cars and utility vehicles. And I don’t think we’re actually talking about roadsters or pickups / vans / trucks here.
(That’s why the power levels of euro cars has been climbing for a while, along with increasing cylinder capacities, then hit a certain plateau and the engine sizes have started to drop again instead. There’s a level you reach when your car is “transport” rather than “a toy” where the available performance easily outstrips what you’ll use in any normal situation, and your focus switches instead to how much it costs to buy and run…)
Oh, incidentally, you buy the 95hp 500 or Panda (high as the tuning goes in them because of how large/strong a transmission will fit in the frame – they crank out torque an insane amount of torque down at 1500rpm)… you’ll get AC with that pretty much as standard. And a pile of other features that would have been expensive luxuries even on American cars in the 80s. Superlight power steering, anti lock brakes and ESP, trip computers, bluetooth-linked stereos, etcetera.
Plus, a regenerating (“oxidising”) particulate filter that massively reduces the amount of soot that comes out of the back. The only dark clouds come when you give it the full beans (which you don’t need to do so often with a powerful engine in a lightweight car), or for the 5 seconds or so every few minutes that the filter dumps the treated particulates.
If you live somewhere that regularly gets above 100 degrees, AC is not a “gadget.”
Especially with a baby in the car.
Actually, those were not battery hubs.
The car had a motor in each hub, the batteries were in the middle of the car, thus it was such a high rider. The other version had smapper batteries, but used the space for the gas engine(s).
What really freaks me out:
Mr. Porsche not only invented the hybrid with that car, he also had 4 wheel drive!
smapper -> smaller
sorry, wrote in darkness
Its a push-me-pull-you.
This was all before Josephine Joseph was born
Use nuclear plants to generate electricity – that’s one of the very few smart things the French do – and break apart water into hydrogen and oxygen (it happens spontaneously above 900 deg C). Reprocess the U-235 fuel; 60% of it is reusable at the end of core life; the plants were built and then mothballed due to NIMBY syndrome back in the early ’70s. Use hydrogen in fuel cells to power cars. (Hydrogen embrittlement of pipelines is not an insurmountable technical problem.) That’s the long-term solution, and could possibly lead the way to a technological renaissance in the US.
Wind and solar simply do not have the energy density or constant generating capacity to support an industrialized, technological society. Go nuclear!
I believe hydrogen is the answer but here in Australia no fuel company has yet made it available to the public. Only 1 fuel station in the country in Perth Western Australia and it only serves 3 daimler buses!
Hybrid cars, defining FAIL for over 100 years.
“itsWind and solar simply do not have the energy density or constant generating capacity to support an industrialized, technological society. Go nuclear!”
Ever think idustrialized society might just die when we can’t supply the energy/resorces?… pay close attention to japan over the next year.
Not all electricity comes from fossil fuel. Hydroelectric stations comtribute a significant amount, and small power plants that run on methane gas tapped from domestic waste sites is becoming more popular.
Also, the ICE has been pretty much developed as far as it can be as far as efficiency is concerned. The electric motor has a lot more development potential ( no pun intended). They will get lighter, more efficient and more powerful in coming years.
The article fail to mention th heaviest tank ever fielded in WWII is design by Porche and hybrid too………