It's perhaps a more limiting factor now than then.
As the article notes most EVs at the turn of the century had a range of 40-70 miles. The model T of around 1910, ten years later, had a range of about 90. Earlier ICE cars were down nearer EVs.
A century ago battery and ICE technology were not that far apart. i.e. both fairly primitive. If electrics had been chosen and had 100 years of continual minor incremental improvements...
> If electrics had been chosen and had 100 years of continual minor incremental improvements...
Battery technology is still basically just ordinary chemistry and, thus, hasn't made much progress in 100 years. E.g., we use a lead acid battery in cars now, and they had lead acid batteries back then.
Just look at the periodic table, pick some elements, and make a battery. They did that 100 years ago also.
If we do something special with graphene, high temperature superconductivity, maybe still with a capacitor of "doped barium-calcium-zirconium-titanate", etc., technology not known 100 years ago, fine, but these are all long shots, both as in risky and how long it will take to be successful or give up.
Gas-electric hybrid involves essentially two engines instead of one but can do some amazing things, e.g.,
Sure, but lead-acid and zinc-carbon, both 19th century technologies, were the main - essentially only - types of batteries until the age of the Walkman in the 80s. Then we got Duracell alkalines and cute adverts. Until then there wasn't a lot of pressure to get better, so they mostly didn't and they wouldn't have sold anyway. Around the same time rechargeables got some development pressure in the form of mobile phones, and there was effort to do better than rubbish NiCds or heavy lead-acid. Even cell sizes remained constant for nearly a century. If there'd been more pressure there'd have been a lot more chemists thinking about improvements than just Ever-Ready, Duracell and Motorola.
Maybe a global electric car industry working on the problem 4x longer than we have would have come up with something better, maybe not. Alternate time lines are never certain. :)
Batteries aren't all of it though - how would personal transportation have evolved if every city and road network had electric distribution points for vehicles - as was planned in the 1910s - instead of filling out with petrol stations? The fast charger networks could easily have been something of the 1940s rather than the 2000's. We'd undoubtedly have standardised on a generic one that worked with every make of car by now. We'd probably have designed cities a little differently too.
Be careful: For the improvements, are close against some quite fundamental chemistry and physics. E.g., for fast charging, the battery has internal resistance, that is, gets hot when charging. Likely the amount of internal resistance varies, but charging as fast as filling a 20 gallon tank of gasoline might encounter something impossible due to the chemistry/physics. Fast charging is one of the reasons for the pursuit of capacitors instead of batteries, e.g., the EEStore effort with barium and titanium. The capacitors also typically are able to discharge much faster than batteries. IIRC, battery charging is a chemical reaction where have to move atoms around. A capacitor, first cut, just moves electrons around. But for research time, EEStore has been at it for some years now.
Where the maintenance and dirtiness were their major detractors, refined fuels and new burners solve these.
Steam engines can and could have been refilled at any gas station, could run on any multi fuel including biodiesel. They theoretically require less maintenance, no oil changes, no cooling system.
They'd also have had greater range and greater top speed (though less acceleration without a hybrid design)
IIRC basic thermodynamics shows that ordinary steam engines can't be very efficient. So, don't get good MPG or miles per bucket of coal, or whatever fuel.
IIRC the main reason for diesel-electric locomotives for trains and large ships was that it was significantly more efficient than just steam, at least steam with just a boiler and pistons.
Of course, really large ships generate steam and then run it through a steam turbine -- no Diesel around.
Stream engines are no longer used on large ships (except for nuclear powered warships). Merchant ships now use large 2-stroke diesel engines for maximum fuel efficiency.
There used to be many large ships driven by oil-fired steam turbines but those have gradually disappeared over the past few decades. Compared to diesel engines, steam turbines are less efficient and require more maintenance.
The most common diesel-electric locomotive today has 6 drive axles. The big steam locomotives designed at their twilight sported 6-10 drive axles, and the most famous and successful of them (the 4-8-8-4 Big Boy) ran 8 drive axles. Mechanical linkage of drive axles isn't what killed the steam locomotive.
Mechanical linkage for multiple direct drive external combustion engines that can operate at 0 rpm is far simpler (the drive axles are basically the crankshaft) than for a single internal combustion engine that must maintain a minimum engine rpm and has to be geared down to axles that are riding on a bogie that pivots separate from the deck of the engine.
To take advantage of the increased efficient of an internal combustion engine you'd need a lot of mechanical complexity unless you go hydraulic (solidly defeating most efficiency improvements) or electric.
> basic thermodynamics shows that ordinary steam engines can't be very efficient
No this is not true, see other comments / Carnot cycle. Steam can be extremely efficient. But diesel engines are much simpler and more compact, it's a trade-off.
The acceleration is more of a function of the powertrain design in steam cars. If you replace the direct drive drive train with one similar to a ICE car (ie clutch+transmission) you can get the acceleration of a ICE car in a steam car. If you want to keep the direct drive though you would need to have a larger engine and use hook-up and variable cut-off to keep the efficiency of the smaller engine while cruising. Steam engines on the whole are pretty similar to electric motors though in having most or all of your torque from 0 rpm which is why many steam cars were direct drive (I think only the Whites and a few race cars had a conventional layout instead of direct drive).
> If you want to keep the direct drive though you would need to have a larger engine and use hook-up and variable cut-off to keep the efficiency of the smaller engine while cruising.
An alternative would be to make hybrids. Use an electric motor to get reasonable acceleration and a smaller steam engine for cruising distance.
Stirling engines have many of the advantages of steam, many of the disadvantages, but they lack the disadvantage of high pressure containment. It's likely that power density would have been too low, however.
A closed loop steam engine, the burners get the boiler hot enough to produce the power they need, then the engine extracts that heat from the boiler to mechanical energy.
I've had the same thought about rotary motors, they're interesting beasts and I wonder what we'd see if they had the same R&D investment like we saw in piston engines.
Alas I think that ship has sailed, aside from energy density the modern electric VFD wins along a whole range of design constraints(torque, size, latency/traction response, efficiency, etc).
We have seen a significant long-term R&D investment but all the nice rotary engines are in prop planes.
Edit: since you mention a ship, some use large opposed-pistol Diesel engines (two oppositely meeting pistons around the combustion chamber per cylinder which also allows the cylinder to be much wider)... don’t see these in either planes or cars... Hydrogen power?—- Hydrogen is difficult to keep contained because it escapes through anything over time unless we put heavy ceramic tanks in our cars.
Unless you're talking about turboprops (jet engines with a gearbox) there really aren't any wankel engines in aircraft. Just a few experimental/EAB conversions out there.
As the article notes most EVs at the turn of the century had a range of 40-70 miles. The model T of around 1910, ten years later, had a range of about 90. Earlier ICE cars were down nearer EVs.
A century ago battery and ICE technology were not that far apart. i.e. both fairly primitive. If electrics had been chosen and had 100 years of continual minor incremental improvements...