Did you know the first car was electric?

The global market for electric vehicles is rapidly increasing. Since 2020, Europe is leading with registrations of new electric cars, followed by China and the United States. But did you know the first electric cars where built 140 years ago?

While developments on electrical drive trains started around 1820, the first approved electric street vehicle had been released by M. Gustave Trouvé in Paris in 1881, followed by inventions of Werner Siemens, the scientists Wiliam Edwart Ayrton and John Perry and many further inventors in the following decades. In 1900, about 40% of cars were electric, 38% ran on steam and only 22% ran on gasoline. For those who could afford electric cars, they seemed to be the better option, as these were easy to turn on, brake, accelerate, there was no exhaust and drivers didn't have to crank the engine everytime they stopped.

In order to make cars available for everyone, inventors started searching for ways to make cars affordable. With the idea of an assembly line system and the invention of the electric starter, Heny Ford revolutionized the car industry, allowing gasoline cars to be mass-produced for the first time and reducing prices for cars to approximately 250 USD for a gasoline car compared to 1,800 USD for an electric vehicle. As scientists were lacking a cheap answer to find storage batteries of light weight which could operate for long distances without recharging, the trend for electric vehicles suddenly stopped around 1935, as vehicles with combustion engines not only topped e-vehicle's speed and range limits, but were affordable for most people.

Today, around 90 years later, the electric car is back. More and more manufacturers are pledging to go electric, as benefits of electric cars range from energy efficiency over emission reduction to lower maintanance needs. While electric vehicles are complex systems and even further grow in complexity to meet trends related to CASE (connected, autonomous, shared, electric), their components and systems must evolve to work in concert.

The Kautex Pentatonic Battery System answers this challenge. Unlike other heavy and in terms of geometric variablilty limited steel and aluminum battery housings, the Pentatonic Battery System offers a customizable, lightweight solution which can be uitlized in electric vehicles, from full hybrid to full battery.