Thanks to you all for all your input into this weighty discussion, I am a little wheezy though, must quit smoking (how could Marx pack in all those cigars ???).
Here's a quote from Freeman & Louca, As Time Goes By (Oxford University Press, p. 274: B.H. Klein showed that in 1900, steam and electric vehicles accounted for about three-quarters "of the four thousand automobiles estimated to have been produced by 57 American firms" (Klein 1977: 91). However, by 1917 about three and a half million automobiles had been registered in the United States, of which less than 50,000 were electric. Steam vehicles were disappearing; the last major steam manufacturrer, the Stanley Motor Carriage Company, produced 730 steam vehicles in 1917 - fewer than Ford produced in one day before lunch (Volti 1990: 43). The simple explanation of the decline of steam and electric vehicles seemed to be, with the benefit of hindsight, that the internal combustion (gasoline) engine was 'better' or even 'optimal'. However in his fascinating article ''Why Internal Combustion ?', Rudi Volti shows that things were by no means so simple. In the very early days both steam and electric cars had many technical advantages, and the IC automobile had some severe disadvantages, notably the sliding gear transmission. invented by Emile Levassor (the 'L' in 'P' and L') in 1891. His own description of his invention became famous: 'C'est brutal mais ca marche !'. The electric car was simpler to start and drive, having no clutch or transmission; moreover, it was quiet, reliable, and odourless. Yet by the 1920s the internal combustion engine completely dominated to car market, leavng the steamers and electrics to very specialized niche markets or museums. A longer operating range was undoubtedly one of the decisive advantages of the IC engine, but this was not purely a technical matter. The chain of refuelling stations and repair and maintenance facilities could conceivably have been organized on a different basis, given different strategies and policies of the utlities, manufacturrers, and regulators. Indeed, in the 1990s policies were being developed to cope with battery recharging services for electric cars in California and elsewhere, because of the polution problems caused by millions of IC engines. However, the 'lock-in' to the IC engine makes any such change to an alternative system a truly massive undertaking. There were over 500 million automobiles in use in the world by the mid-1990s. The availability of cheap low-cost petrol (gasoline) was a decisive advantage of the IC engine (Section 8.4), and compounded by this vast lock-in to the internal combustion engine was the success of the Ford's assembly line, which reduced the cost and price of the Model T dramatically. The price of a model T fell from $850 in 1908 to $600 in 1913 and to $360 in 1916, because of a combination of organisational, technical and social innovations". The truth is that I bought a second-hand orange Ford Escort in New Zealand, must have been 1992. Or was it 1993 ? It crapped out eventually, I could barely drive it back from the hypnotherapist that I had been to see for a "quite smoking" session. "I got blisters on my fingers" (Sir Richard Starkey, at the end of "Helter Skelter" by The Beatles). Jurriaan
