The SJSU Mineta Transportation Institute (MTI) hosted a Zoom webinar Tuesday in partnership with the Department of History and the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in celebration of Earth Day and to educate participants about the past, present and future of electric vehicles (EVs).
Earth Day, which is celebrated to encourage environmental protection and awareness, has been celebrated every year on April 22 since 1970, according to the Earth Day organization website. The event was created by SJSU alumnus and Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson.
Tuesday’s webinar aimed to be an “annual reminder” for individuals to be mindful of the planet's health and an opportunity to discuss topics relating to the environment including electric vehicle technology, according to the SJSU MTI webpage.
The event was hosted by Asha Weinstein Agrawal, education director of the transportation institute.
Speakers included Gijs Mom, former associate professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology and Daniel Sperling, distinguished Blue Planet Prize professor of the UC Davis Civil Engineering and Environmental Science programs.
Mom and Sperling discussed the potential for electric vehicles to become sustainable transportation systems for upcoming generations while examining the infrastructure's history.
Mom said scientists and engineers have in fact been developing ideas for vehicles to function independently from gasoline and steam engines for nearly two centuries.
Mom said many people have varying expectations of what the clean-energy car should look like, and for decades people imagined “flying cars” as the vehicles of the future.
“The engineering trends in 1900 imagined the future as a kind of congestion in the air, because at that moment the airplane and air balloon were very popular,” Mom said during the event.
Mom shared a vintage image from a Dutch engineering journal published in 1900, which he said was one of the first conceptualized electric vehicles.
He said during the early 1900’s the future of electric vehicles was a topic of interest, but electric engines became a fantasy because of the success of gasoline-dependent internal combustion engines.
Mom said the vehicles did not fail because of technological disadvantages, but because of the perception that transportation by electric vehicles was “for the incompetent.”
Agrawal also said she believes the transportation previously failed because society was not “culturally ready” for the new technology.
“Around 1920 there were both electric vehicles and internal combustion gasoline powered vehicles floating in the United States,” Agrawal said in a Zoom call. “There was this marketing campaign that electric vehicles were for ladies and gas vehicles were for men.”
Agrawal said in the 1920’s some favored electric vehicles because they had a shorter range, meaning they didn’t travel as fast or far as a gasoline vehicle.She said marketing tactics at the time were “gender specific claims,” arguing that women needed slower vehicles to drive around the neighborhood and men needed faster vehicles for longer commutes to work.
She added that gasoline vehicles required a “strong arm” to crank the dirty starter and women were believed to be better suited for a “cleaner” vehicle with a button to start its engine. Many of the speakers said people often favor gasoline vehicles because of economic concerns rather than gender stereotypes.
In his presentation, Mom said there are economic disadvantages of modern electric and hybrid vehicles.“Most experts concluded that for this generation, the [electric vehicle] cannot compete with mainstream vehicles, in terms of cost,” Mom said.
Sperling added that the price of electric vehicles has decreased over the past decade.
Sperling said the manufacturing cost for batteries in electric cars has reduced by 90% since 2010, which has lowered the sales cost of the electric vehicles.
Historically, lead acid was the primary manufacturing method for EV batteries throughout the 90’s, until nickel metal hydride batteries emerged in the 2000’s.
“We've gone from lead acid to nickel metal hydride and then lithium ion batteries which have been continually improved and cost reduced,” Dr. Sperling said. “There's likely to be new batteries in the future so the costs are continuing to come down, that's why everyone expects zero emission vehicles to really dominate the future.”
