Skip to footer

Inventions that were going to change the world – but didn’t

5. The Electric Car

Tyrone Siu/Reuters/File
A sign is painted on a parking space for electric cars inside a car park in Hong Kong. The 2014 Smart ForTwo is the smallest, shortest, and cheapest electric car sold in the US.

With images of yellow haze covering Los Angeles and Beijing, continuing reports of global warming, and gas prices skyrocketing, some may wonder: what ever happened to the electric car?

Electric cars actually go back further than you might think. The first wave of electric cars gained popularity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where they were popular for being less noisy, smelly, and bumpy than their gasoline-powered counterparts, though slower in speed, as the New York Times reported in 1911. However, cheap gas and the rise of the internal combustion engine, pushed electric cars to the auto-wayside.

Then people realized that cheaper gas and the internal combustion engine produced something other than high-speed cars: air pollution. Due to this, in 1966 the United States passed the Electric Vehicle Development Act to provide money to universities researching electric car technology, and in the early 1990s the California Air Resources Board (CARB) began pushing toward a zero-emission vehicle future. During this time, car manufacturers from Toyota to BMW began releasing electric car models. So why aren’t we seeing electric cars on the road today?

The technology is still yet to be developed for widespread commercial appeal. Read: batteries are too heavy, too expensive, and require a lot of charge for a short-range of driving (one of the most popular models, the Nissan Leaf, can only go about 75 miles on a charge). Some say the technology is available, but has been restricted by auto manufacturers working with oil companies to keep cars guzzling gas. The 2006 documentary “Who Killed The Electric Car?” follows the rise and fall of the GM EV 1, and the mysterious circumstances that could point to oil companies pressuring car manufacturers to scrap the zero-emission technology.

However, things may be looking up for the electric car. Elon Musk, founder of rapidly growing electric car company Tesla Motors, believes half of all new cars will be electric by 2020, and this summer Nissan Leaf sales saw a huge boost when Nissan dropped the price below $20,000.

But is this just another optimistic wave? Or are electric cars here to stay? We’ll find out in 2020.

5 of 7
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.