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The Electric Vehicle by Gijs Mom, Johns Hopkins University Press, 拢39.50/$54.95, ISBN 0801871387 Reviewed by Antony Anderson

IN 1899 the Belgian Camille Jenatzy exceeded 100 kilometres per hour in his rocket-shaped electric car La Jamais Contente (Never Satisfied). Three years later in the US, Walter Baker reached the unprecedented speed of 192 km/hr when test-driving his aerodynamically shaped electric Torpedo.

In those days, proponents of electric vehicles could claim quietness and convenience: early petrol vehicles were noisy and smelly. Of a petrol-driven ambulance, one critic wrote: 鈥淚t puts the sick person to be transported in continual danger of being burnt alive.鈥� And electric vehicles, often fitted with direct-drive hub motors, were simpler than their petrol counterparts and could easily be maintained, as long as their owners were prepared to handle sulphuric acid and braze lead battery plates.

The mass commandeering of horses and petrol-driven vehicles by the British army in 1914 led to a sudden surge in demand for electric vehicles in the UK, partly because no one was likely to want to commandeer one. Electric taxis were serviced centrally, with a battery change taking 70 seconds. Only in the countryside was the restricted range of the electric vehicle a disadvantage. In the towns electric taxis, buses, fire engines, public service and delivery vehicles soon found fairly widespread use. In 1939 half of the service vehicles and brewers鈥� delivery vehicles in Berlin were electric, and 30,000 electric cars and more than 10,000 electric trucks plied American roads.

Why then did the electric vehicle not fulfil its early promise? Gijs Mom鈥檚 fascinating review suggests that the petrol-driven car borrowed key elements from the electric 鈥� including its maintenance system, pneumatic tyres and front wheel drive 鈥� negating the latter鈥檚 advantage.

Historians of technology, social historians, economists or any who question the prodigality of our modern gas-guzzling society, will find this fascinating book most illuminating.