A Cautionary Technological Story From The Battery-powered Buses

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A Cautionary Technological Story From The Battery-powered Buses fficeffice" />  July 15th 1907, the world’s first battery-powered buses come to operation in ffice:***arttags" />London. The owner,  London Electro-bus Company had high hopes that this quiet and fume-free form of transport would replace the horse. At its peak, the company had a fleet of 20 buses. But despite being popular with passengers the serviced collapsed in 1909. The history books imply that the collapse was caused by technical drawbacks and a price war. It was not. The untold story is that the collapse was caused by systematic fraud. And it set back the cause of battery buses by a hundred years. On any rational asses***ent of the technology the electro-bus had a good chance of success. At the beginning of 1906 there were only 230 motor buses in London. They were widely reviled for their evil ***ells and noise. At any one time a quarter of them were off the road for repairs. In 1907 the economist predicted “the triumph of the horse”. The future of public-transport technology was unclean yet. The electro-buses in this were well engineered and well managed. All battery buses h***e a limited range because of the weight of their batteries. The electro-bus needed 1.5 tones of lead-acid batteries to carry its 34 passengers. It could tr***el 60km on one charge. So at lunchtime the buses went to a garage in Victoria and drove up a ramp to replace new set batteries. This operation was taken three minutes. In April 1906 the London Electro-bus Company floated its shares on the stock-market. It wanted ￡300,00 to but 300 buses on the streets. Only the first day the flotation raised ￡120,000 and the share offer on course to be bully subscribed. But the next day some awkward questions surfaced. The company was buying rights to a patent for ￡20,000 from the Baron de Martigny. But the patent was old and had nothing to do with battery buses. The investors sued for their money back. The company had to return ￡80,000. Martigny was only the front man. The mastermind behind this and a clutch of subsequent scams was Edward Lehwess, a German lawyer and serial con-artist. After this initial fiasco the ndon Electrobus Company struggled to raise money. But Lehwess had set up a network of front companies to siphon off the company’s money. His personal secretary later said that Lehwess “used the company’s banking accounts indiscriminately for his own purpose”. The London Electrobus Company paid the Electric Vehicle Company more than ￡31,000 in advance for 50 buses. Only 20 were ever delivered. The buses were extortionately overpriced—each one cost about ￡300 more than a motor bus. On ***erage lehwess tooke ￡1 for every ￡3 that the company raised. It was a rate of attrition that caused the company went into liquidation. Even then the scams continued. Lehwess bought eight buses for ￡800 from the liquidators, saying they were only fit for spares. He sold them to Brighton for ￡3,500, and this buses ran for another six year. That was a testament to the electrobus’s reliability at a time when the life of a motor bus was measured in months. Whether the fraud was truly a tipping point for electric vehicles is impossible to say. But it is a commonplace of innovation—from railway gauges to semiconductors to software—that the “best” technology is not always the most successful one. Once an industry standard has been established, it is hard to displace. If Lehwess and Martigny had not pulled their scam, modern cities might be an awful lot cleaner than they actually are.   ( From The Economist Jul. 10, 2007)