La rivista e il marketplace globale per gli appassionati di auto d’epoca, creati da appassionati.
La rivista e il marketplace globale per gli appassionati di auto d’epoca, creati da appassionati.
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Automatic Electric — Carr’s car lasted only a year
It was a bit of a shock to take off in a near-new car last week. By Toutatis, was that steering light! And then those brakes! Being used to our own 30-year old daily this was clearly something from another era. One gentle touch of the big toe would have been sufficient to make the thing stop at once. So the firm foot used was quite enough to launch the passengers. Is that progress? It will be to many, we guess.
Automatic Electric
Today’s Friday Lady shows a sweet little commercial vehicle named the Automatic Electric, which must have been meant to be something equally modern back in 1921. That’s when this photograph was taken. The Automatic Electric was conceived in a number of variants by a man named William C. Carr of Buffalo, New York. He advertised his creation with "Anyone can learn to drive it in a few minutes", while further praise mentioned that "it will run 50 miles on one charge of electricity at a speed of fifteen miles per hour. Cost for operating and maintenance only a few cents per day." Not bad for a city grocery, or too good to be true? Fact is that Carr’s car lasted only a year before it disappeared silently from the scene. There’s a survivor in the Buffalo Transportation Pierce Arrow Museum, but that has to be a rarity.
Carr did file a number of patents for water heating and air conditioning systems in the mid-1930s, or so we found, when we discovered that Chrysler was the first to introduce a semi-portable air conditioning unit in 1935. Whether the two can be linked remains a mystery though.
Words Jeroen Booij. Picture Buffalo Architecture & History.
Pubblicato:
venerdì maggio 27th, 2022
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Commenti
David Grimstead
27 Maggio 2022, 19:43
Critical of users of older ones, the paper concluded that electric vehicles by then were not like those of 10 or 20 years before: “every feature of construction and equipment, from battery to motor, including steering gear and frame, had been improved.” Was that true of Carr’s cars, with what appears to be tiller steering - a feature, however, already well-known and deftly handled for a dozen or more years by women drivers of electric runabouts!?
Carr’s one notable competitor, of course: the Automobile Bureau of the New York Edison Co. was at the time a sponsor of electric vehicle exhibitions in New York City. He certainly missed the commercial boat, as by 1926 it was claimed that in America “the Electric Delivery Van is used to a far greater extent..., the delivery of ice cream, bread, laundry, coal, tea, and even chewing-gum is done by electric trucks.”
Wonder if your “Friday lady” was subjected to the same inflammatory opinion, expressed in the press in post-WWI Britain about working women motor drivers: “There are still a few women drivers of commercial and other cars in Liverpool, and ex-Service men, who have the misfortune to be unemployed, are demanding that the drivers' licenses should not be renewed in order that they may have the opportunity of getting a job. Frequently one sees women drivers of light vans, and whilst being fully sympathetic with the demands of the ex-soldiers for a job, elementary justice demands that women should have the right to drive if they want to. The real question is: "Why do employers give them a job?"