When I grew in Akron, I recall an older woman in our neighborhood who drove her electric car to run all her errands. I suspect it was a Detroit Electric assembled in the late teens or early 1920s. It was silent and my father told me it had few moving parts, was easy to maintain and inexpensive to run. I also remember the electric milk truck that came to our home. It was, I think, one of the DIVCO [[Detroit Industrial Vehicle Co.) trucks with just one pedal. The driver stepped on pedal to go and took his foot off to brake. DIVCO produced substantial numbers of such milk trucks from 1926 to 1986.

The post office experimented with electric trucks a number of times throughout the Twentieth Century. They ordered 350 electric trucks from Jeep in 1974; 375 from a firm in Florida in 1980 and, in 2000, ordered 500 electric trucks from Ford. That experiment ended. General Motors went into the “mass production” of their EV1 vehicle in 1996 and assembled about 1100 before stopping in 2002.

A few years ago, some thought there would be lively competition between the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt. The Leaf still sells in modest number but the Volt may soon join the ranks of Saturn, Oakland, La Salle and Pontiac.

I conclude that most attempts to produce and market electric vehicles in the Twentieth Century and in the early years of this one were not successful. Now we are told, that the future of the auto industry is in electric vehicles, a claim that could have been made in 1909 or so. What is different this time around? I must be missing something important.