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Mopar electric cars, from the 1800s to today!
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Oct 2, 2024
A quick history dive including the early electric cars that became part of Chrysler history, the 1980s experiments, Dodge 50 electric truck, and the many electric minivans—including their final pre-Fiat try at mass production! See the first production 400V two-speed Mopar electric cars! All in less than ten minutes! #motales #electriccar #chrysler #electricmotors #edison #tevan
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Hi, this is Motel's Dave, and I'm going to guide you through a history of Chrysler
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Electric cars from the 1880s on, and I know that there was no Chrysler in the 1880s, but that's
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when we start. Why? Because Thomas Edison had to develop a high-performance generator, of which
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there were none when he started out, one which produced a constant voltage and varied in amperage
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of which there were none when he started out, in order to power the electric lights properly
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So the thing about generators is that they're actually bidirectional, if they're not
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not set up to stop this behavior. You know, normally you turn one end and you get electricity
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out the other, but if you put the electricity into one end, then you get motion at the other
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So Edison essentially, and this is simplifying a bit, laid down his high performance generator
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and applied electricity to one end and he got motion out of the other. So he started working with
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Frank Sprigg to try to push this forward, and they gave demonstrations at the 1883 World's Fair
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and that inspired a lot of work in the field. I might add that Edison left in 1883
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and he assigned all the intellectual property over to Franks Bragg. Bragg went on to do some excellent work
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So a year after this demonstration at the World's Fair, Riker Electric was created
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Now, for Edison, incidentally, he worked on new batteries from 1901 on
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resulting in the nickel-iron alkaline battery. It was the first battery that I know of, at least
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that used a basic alkaline solution, rather than an acid solution, and the idea was that it would last longer
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and it was used for over a century. So let's move on, and this is all from a talk I gave to the restored rusty relics in New Jersey
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but here you can see mergers of companies that eventually became Chrysler
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And we're following from Riker Electric Motor and the Morrison-Salem Electrobat. And Riker started out in 1884, and they started making cars in 1898
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Then they changed her name to Electric Vehicle Company in 1890. Meanwhile the Electrobat that was an interesting idea because the thought was that they would have electrically powered taxis And that was their main market was taxis And they produced a bunch of these not many by today standards And then they were acquired by electric carriage and wagon company
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which then became the electric vehicle company. All of these were merged together into
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the electric vehicle company in 1890. And the motivation there, behind that and the electric
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vehicle company of 1897 was, let's get a monopoly on every taxi in the country
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Electric vehicle merged with Columbia, and Columbia was a basically high-end gasoline-powered car
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so now you had Columbia and the electric vehicle company. And these were pretty high-end vehicles
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They were kind of expensive, all of them, the regular Columbia and the Columbia Electric
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So in 1908, as an example, can they have a full range of electric and gasoline-powered cars
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So what we're looking at now is a Columbia motor car that's electric, that's made by the electric vehicle company
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However, by the 1910s, gasoline was clearly the future, and Columbia dropped the electric cars
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There were a lot of factors in this, and we're not going to get into them. So there's two forgotten vehicles along the way
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I don't know if either of these was important in Chrysler's work, but in 1979, Chrysler and General Electric and the Department of Energy got together
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and they built the ETV concept. I think that was mainly for publicity, but it did have regenerative braking
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It looked a bit like a Dodge Daytona, by the way, like a 1980s Dodge Daytona
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So in 1980, a company called Jet converted 10 Plymouth Turismo TC3s
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into electric cars. They had a 70-mile range with a 10-hour recharge on 220 volts
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They called it the Electrica-O-O-7. It had a manual transmission and a gasoline-powered heater
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and it was only sold in Israel. A bit more practical were these 1981 Dodge-50 electric vans
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which were only sold in the UK, and they were sold. they were not leased
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And these used a Comer space van chassis cab, and that was an interesting vehicle
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because the frame and the basic power train was from Comer, and they took a Dodge B-van body, and they put it around that
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It was dead slow, or at people who used them, said that they were dead slow
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but it did have more power than the normal gasoline engine on this or the normal diesel engine It had a 40 top per hour top speed They made 70 of them They were for the last mile shipments So basically England had a very busy
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commercial train set up at that point. So goods were shipped around by train. And then you take
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them the last mile to wherever they went by truck. A huge step forward was the first serious
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price for electric car. And this was really a bunch of series. They were all experimental and they
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kept changing the design as they went along. But we start out with the 1992 TEVAN
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So T stands for T-115, E stands for electric, and then you have van, T-E-Van
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And it used nickel-iron batteries or it used NICADs, depending on where it was in development
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They made 66 of them. They were all sold to buyers. They used DC motors and they used AC motors, depending on where they were
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nail-ad air conditioning, power steering, and power brakes, and quote, same-day acceleration
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You hit the gas, and at some point that day you're bound to go faster
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By the way, no need to write in a comment that you don't hit the gas on an electric car
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So the TE van had a two-speed automatic transmission, was rated at 70 horsepower
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which is a bit lower than the charger Daytona, weighed 4,000 pounds
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and at a top speed around 60 miles per hour, which is above their previous electrics
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Chrysler provided the electronics from their Huntsville electronics group. Next up, we had the 1992 Epic Showcar
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So you notice that this show car comes out in the same year as the actual TE van
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This one had nickel iron batteries, and it was basically a TE van motor and transmission in a more modern package
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and it was a sneaky way to preview the next generation minivans
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They finally made actual epics, and Epic stands for an electric-powered interurban commuter
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That's a tortured acronym if ever I heard one. But they made them with Dodge and Plymouth versions
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and they were made on the regular assembly lines, along with regular minivans. Most of them had nickel-metal hydride batteries
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They had an 80-mile range, and 0 to 60 in around 16 seconds
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which is bad, but not as bad as it might sound. A hundred horsepower from these And keep in mind that the original minivan it weighed a bit less admittedly but it only had a 2 engine putting out roughly 90 horsepower so there zero to 60 times from nothing to write home about either
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The Epic had a heat pump with the electric heating. It had regenerative braking, which was good
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Again, the body was a laboratory for the next generation minivans, and it had stone-go rear seats
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They made around 200 of these, from 1996 to 1998, and they all had the three-year 36,000 mile warranty
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Now, from there they were going to go on, and for 2003, they were going to truly mass-produce these things
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on the regular assembly line. They're going to have more serious batteries
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and they were going to have more serious motors. And what happened to them, you may ask
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because you might not remember the 2003. This is what happened to them
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Daimler showed up, and so the prototypes, which were production intent, were all trashed
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And you ask why? And it was fear of life. from the 400-volt electrical system. Yes, the same voltage as the current Dodge Charger
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that you will be able to buy at your dealership one of these days. And probably a lot of not-invented
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here syndrome. They did make Daimler gem cars. They bought the company, Gem, that made them, rather
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You could say that the next step was the Pacifica Hybrid, followed by Jeeps 4x E. Those are both
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plug-in hybrids, but they still have engines there. The next true battery electric was
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or rather is becoming the Dodge Charger, and the Ram 1500 BEV and the Pro Master BEV
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the Pro Master BEV is already out, and a RAM charger series hybrid
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which may reduce the amount of batteries that you have to carry around and relieve range anxiety is out about a year from now
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So now they're talking about 800-volt electrical systems, but not yet. And the big thing that they've got
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is the standardized EV motor assembly, where you have all your electric drive
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in one place called the electric drive module. So that's what's coming up for the future
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and you probably know about that already. And if you don't, there are better videos to learn it from
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But this was a quick look through Chrysler's long, if not incredibly busy electric car history
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I'm Motels Dave. You can find more stuff at motels.com
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