Costs, technology and culture: Propelling the early taxicab, 1900-25

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2003 by Mom, Gijs

Historians of transport have come up with several reasons why, at the beginning of automotive history, the petrol-engined car soon appeared to be the preferred means of road transport. Most of the arguments in favour of the internal combustion engine and against the steam engine and the electric motor are technological or economic in nature. However, detailed research into some electric vehicle fleets, especially a well documented eighty-vehicle fleet in Amsterdam between 1909 and 1925, does not support this line of reasoning.1 In particular, the thesis that the petrol-engine car was technologically or economically superior to its electric or steam-driven competitors seems to be inspired by hindsight rather than based on solid historical evidence.

It is not hard to find tautological definitions of this superiority in the historiography of technology. According to Robin Cowan, for instance, in his study of the nuclear power reactor, 'the superior technology is that which, if it were to be the surviving one, would maximize net benefits from the technology choice process'.2 The assumption among historians of technology and transport of the petrol engine's technical superiority is open to question. For example, in her analysis of female and male car culture Virginia Scharff bases her argument partly on the alleged technical inferiority of the electric car.3

In another case James Foreman-Peck calculated for the United States that the steam car was the most popular because of its low fuel and purchase costs, and that the petrol car became the 'best buy' when the annual distance covered was more than 53,000 km.4 It is unlikely, however, that money was an issue for early automobile pioneers: in those days anyone who could afford a car was replacing his stable of horses, and sometimes bought several - one for driving out of town, one for shopping, and so on.

The pivotal period, therefore, to investigate this question seems to be the transition phase shortly before and after the recession of 1907, when the market hesitated to expand to buyers willing to motorise on the basis of a limited budget. Like fleet managers they had to choose. Elsewhere I have argued that historical evidence suggests cultural rather than economic and technical factors to explain the choice of the internal combustion engine.5 Economic considerations were not explicitly included in the analysis, mainly because it is extremely difficult to find coherent data. The most one can say about it is that incidental cost calculations contradict each other so much that no consistent picture can be drawn from the data.

But what if the car was used not for pleasure but purely as a means of transport, like the taxicab? If costs were ever a decisive argument for or against electric propulsion it would be in this particular field of urban vehicle fleet management. After all, modern versions of fleet management, based on scientific fodder analysis and on the monitoring of individual carriage performance, were already emerging during the second half of the nineteenth century, for instance at the Paris monopoly concern CGV. Although pleasure and utilitarian applications are not directly comparable, certainly not in the case of electric propulsion, if the electric taxicabs proved to be more expensive than petrol-engined cabs, or if their technology proved 'inferior', the case for the electric vehicle would not be strengthened. Fortunately, very detailed logs of an eighty-vehicle electric taxicab fleet in Amsterdam have been preserved, enabling us to test this hypothesis.6

The emergence of the petrol-driven taxicab, 1905-14

Most historians' negative attitude towards the electric vehicle as a serious alternative to the petrol-engine car stems from the first generation of electric road propulsion, when several early taxicab experiments proved disastrous, mainly because of defective battery technology.7 It should be remembered, however, that during the period up to the beginning of the twentieth century not a single large-scale taxicab experiment on the basis of the petrol car was initiated, simply because that type of vehicle was considered too unreliable. However, for the second generation of electric road propulsion, from shortly before the recession of 1907 until the outbreak of the First World War, the situation changed drastically. Not only were reliable batteries appearing on the market, but the petrol-engine car market showed signs of saturation. Petrol-engine car manufacturers, whose products functioned mainly as periurban adventure machines (operating within and beyond the largest urban areas), started to develop more reliable products which could compete with electric vehicles as reliable town cars. Generally speaking, transport historiography has not fully recognised the consequences of this: early car use had a substantial utilitarian component, which, until the urban petrol-engine car appeared on the scene, was realised for the most part by electric propulsion. The taxicab was a new means of propaganda for motoring during this second phase as the successor of the sports car. Moreover the deployment of the taxicab in tough city conditions was regarded as a realistic test of the usefulness of the automobile as a means of transport.