It's a trend that has happened for over a century: if you ever see a renewed interested in electrified vehicles, there's a very good chance it's somehow tied to gasoline.
Sometimes—especially more recently—an EV resurgence is driven by a need to combat pollution from internal combustion vehicles. But other times, the volatility of gas prices or the scarcity of fuel will cause automakers and customers alike to think about what else is out there beyond the standard engine.
In the 1960s, there was renewed interest from automakers to create electric vehicles, prompted by rising gas prices in various global markets. Granted, the world wouldn't see true oil crises for another decade, but the trends got a lot of people thinking.
They began experimenting both with EV conversions of existing combustion cars as well as radical new ways of building cars (and making them out of plastic, fiberglass and materials other than steel) and powering them with electricity.
The 1950s were a decade of postwar prosperity in many places but austerity in others. After that, the 1960s became a decade of experimentation, both in terms of design as well as technology. Cars started to take on the shape that would become the standard for decades to come and designers came up with wild concepts unlike anything that had ever been produced before.
With this experimentation came a renewed optimism among some that cars would soon go electric. The shift to electricity didn't happen as quickly as many thought in the 1960s, but this decade was pivotal for the future of EVs.
(Welcome to The History of Electric Vehicles, where we'll cover the many ways that EVs have been a part of more than 150 years of automotive history. In this installment, we'll look at EVs' role in the earliest days of the horseless carriage. Also read part one, part two and part three of the series.)
Pioneers Emerge
One of the first companies to do an EV conversion was the U.S,-based Henney Motor Company, which launched the Henney Kilowatt in 1959. It was basically a re-engineered Renault Dauphine, which had a 7-hp electric motor, a top speed of 40 mph and a range of 40 miles.
It received an upgraded battery in 1960, increasing its top speed to almost 60 mph and its range to over 60 miles. Just 47 cars were ever completed, and of those, 15 made it into the hands of private buyers. Only a handful survive to this day, so consider yourself very lucky if you ever see one.
General Motors also showed an interest in making electric vehicles. It put an electric powertrain in a Corvair and created the Electrovair in 1964. The company updated the concept in 1966 and called it the Electrovair II.
GM picked the Corvair as the base for its electric car experiment because it was the lightest and most advanced vehicle in its lineup. Because it was rear-engined, it was easier to put a motor in the back and power the rear wheels. It made 115 hp in electric form, which was more than the base Corvair’s 90 hp output, allowing it to accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 16.7 seconds.
It drew from a 532-volt silver-oxide battery with 286 cells wired in series that amounted to about 26.4 kilowatt-hours of capacity and weighed about 680 pounds, giving the car between 40 and 80 miles of range. GM never put this car into production due to its limited range.
The silver-oxide batteries were also heavy and expensive and they apparently needed to be replaced after just 100 charging cycles. GM would try a similar formula again over a decade later with the Electrovette, an EV concept/prototype based on the Chevette, which had a range of 50 miles while traveling at 30 mph.
The Pioneer was a bespoke EV built in 1960 by Nic-L-Silver Battery Company, based in Santa Ana, California. It was a low-slung two-seater with a fiberglass body and had two 8-hp motors, each powering one of the rear wheels. It had a top speed of 50 mph but very brisk acceleration, according to Sports Car Illustrated (later called Car and Driver), and it promised to deliver a range of between 100 and 150 miles. Today, however, that seems unfeasible given its battery capacity of just 11.3 kWh.
Three Pioneer prototypes are said to have been created (one of which was a convertible), and two still exist today thanks to the fact that their fiberglass bodies didn’t rust.
City Cars Too
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, several automakers came up with small electric city runabouts. They didn’t catch on initially, but they inspired the many tiny electric cars available around the world today, like the Microlino or the Baojun E-Series in China. The Ford Comuta was an experimental microcar made in the UK in 1967 that had a 4 kWh battery pack with a range of 37 miles and a top speed of 25 mph.
GM created the exceptionally petit XP 512 in 1969 with ICE, hybrid and fully electric powertrains in a vehicle with a total length of 86.3 inches. The electric variant had a range of 58 miles and a top speed of 25 mph. A 115-volt household outlet could fully charge it in 7 hours.
AMC made something similar in the form of the very stylish 1967 Amitron, whose design predicted the Tesla Cybertruck decades ago. It had a claimed range of up to 150 miles at a speed of 50 mph—very impressive for the time. This came courtesy of a 22.5 kWh battery pack, which had a main lithium-nickel-fluoride battery pack, which in turn sent power to a separate nickel-cadmium battery that gave the motors the peak power they needed.
What was even more remarkable was the weight of all those batteries, which just nudged 200 pounds. Had it used the more common lead-acid batteries, the whole setup would have weighed many times more. This all came at a cost, literally. The batteries were far too expensive to even consider the production of such a vehicle, and the Amitron remained an experimental prototype.
General Electric also tried its hand at making a small electric car. It created the Delta experimental vehicle in 1968, which still looks comically disproportionate to this day, yet it could exceed 100 miles on one charge in stop-start city traffic. GE refined the Delta's design into a sleeker shape, which became the 1977 GE-100, whose battery pack was in the floor just like in most modern EVs.
Japan Shows Up To The Party
Even Toyota was experimenting with tiny EVs in the late 1960s. The Toyota EX-II prototype must have been quite a futuristic sight at the 1969 Tokyo Motor Show where it debuted. The manufacturer never released any specs for it, probably because it was not conceived as a working prototype but rather as a design study.
Nissan also revealed a tiny EV concept in the form of the 1970 315-a concept, which was rear-wheel drive and had a top speed of 59 mph. Daihatsu, Ford, Fiat, Volvo and Mercedes-Benz also experimented with similar concepts going into the early 1980s, but none were ever put into production.
One of the only urban electric runabouts that did see production was the CitiCar, made by Sebring-Vanguard Inc. from 1974 until 1977, which had a range of 40 miles. The company was then acquired by Commuter Vehicles, and it renamed the electric vehicle to Comuta-Car or Comuta-Van (which had a longer wheelbase, 12 hp motor and a three-speed transmission), depending on the variant and was kept in production until 1982.
GE participated in the creation of another experimental vehicle, the 1979 Chrysler ETV-1, which was a slightly larger, sportier and more elegant coupe than the previous two experimental EVs. Its battery was arranged in a spine along the center of the vehicle and its makers said it could exceed 125 miles of range when driven constantly on the highway. Urban driving brought the range down to around 70 miles.
By the end of the 1970s, manufacturers’ interest in making electric cars began to wane again, and while there were still some experimental one-off prototypes made, there were no notable production EVs made in the 1980s. Ford made the ETX-I, basically an EV-converted Escort in 1981 in collaboration with General Electric, but it never made it into production.
The concept was turned into a real car that you could buy in the form of the Escort Electrica by Jet Industries out of Austin, Texas, which also turned the Dodge Rampage into an EV. Both had the same motor and battery combo and had a range of 50 to 60 miles.
Renault made an electric version of its 5 (sold as the LeCar in the US) in very limited numbers (probably under 200 examples) and sold them mainly in France, the UK and other European countries. US-spec LeCars were also converted into EVs in 1979 and 1980 by the California-based U.S. Electricar Corporation, which called its creation the Lectric Leopard. Renault recently relaunched the 5 as a modern EV with a retro design inspired by the original.
In our next installment, we start to approach the modern era, and we focus on what was perhaps the ultimate "could've been" EV experiment if it hadn't been killed too soon.
Did You Know?
The CitiCar built by Sebring-Vanguard between 1970 and 1974 is the first true mass-produced electric vehicle. If we include vehicles produced after it was taken over by Commuter Vehicles, which kept it in production until 1982, a total of 4,444 vehicles were built. It was only surpassed by the Nissan Leaf in 2011.
Gallery: 1960s and 70s EVs
