From:
http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/title_pages/3162.html

The Electric Vehicle
Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age
By Gijs Mom

$54.95 hardcover 440 pages
Release date: April 23, 2004
ISBN: 0801871387

Johns Hopkins University Press
2715 North Charles Street
Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

Mr. Mahinder Kingra
Publicity Manager
msk@ jhu.edu
410-516-6939 Fax 410-516-4189

About the author:
Gijs Mom is an assistant professor in the history of technology at the
Technical University of Eindhoven.

Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
Den Dolech 2
P.O. Box 513
5600 MB Eindhoven,
The Nederlands
http://www.tue.nl
G.P.A.Mom@ tm.tue.nl
Phone: 040 - 247 5764 /// 2708
Fax: 040 - 244 4602

Recent attention to hybrid cars that run on both gasoline and electric
batteries has made the electric car an apparent alternative to the internal
combustion engine and its attendant environmental costs and geopolitical
implications. Few people realize that the electric car-neither a recent
invention nor a historical curiosity-has a story as old as that of the
gasoline-powered automobile, and that at one time many in the nascent
automobile industry believed battery-powered engines would become the
dominant technology. In both Europe and America, electric cars and trucks
succeeded in meeting the needs of a wide range of consumers. Before World
War II, as many as 30,000 electric cars and more than 10,000 electric trucks
plied American roads; European cities were busy with, electrically propelled
fire engines, taxis, delivery vans, buses, heavy trucks and private cars.

Even so, throughout the century-long history of electric propulsion, the
widespread conviction it was an inferior technology remained stubbornly in
place, an assumption mirrored in popular and scholarly memory. In The
Electric Vehicle, Gijs Mom challenges this view, arguing that at the
beginning of the automobile age neither the internal combustion engine nor
the battery-powered vehicle enjoyed a clear advantage. He explores the
technology and marketing/consumer-ratio faction relationship over four
"generations" of electric-vehicle design, with separate chapters on
privately owned passenger cars and commercial vehicles. Mom makes
comparisons among European countries and between Europe and America.

He finds that the electric vehicle offered many advantages, among them
greater reliability and control, less noise and pollution. He also argues
that a nexus of factors-cultural (underpowered and less rugged, electric
cars seemed "feminine" at a time when most car buyers were men), structural
(the shortcomings of battery technology at the time), and systemic (the
infrastructural problems of changing large numbers of batteries)-ultimately
gave an edge to the internal combustion engine. One hopes, as a new
generation of electric vehicles becomes a reality, The Electric Vehicle
offers a long-overdue reassessment of the place of this technology in the
history of street transportation.

"The Electric Vehicle makes an important contribution to the scholarship on
the history of the automobile. The author has managed to develop one of the
most wide-ranging comparative examinations of a particular technological
system since Hughes' Networks of Power. Mom's scholarship is
impeccable."-Bruce E. Seely, Michigan Technological University

"Crossing disciplines, combining technical, economic and social concerns,
and adopting an international perspective, The Electric Vehicle is a very
important book that sets a new standard for research in the history of
technology."-Clay McShane, Northeastern University

Order the book:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0801871387/electrifyingt-20