The electric car arrives - again.

• Author: Dunn, Seth

The first mass-produced electric cars in modern times are here. They are expensive, limited in capability, and unfamiliar to most consumers. But so were the early Model Ts and personal computers.

It was two bicycle mechanics from Massachusetts, Charles and Frank Duryea, who rolled out the first commercially manufactured automobiles - (13) of their Duryea Motor Wagons - in Detroit in June of 1896. Dubbed "horseless carriages," they ran on a noisy new invention known as the internal-combustion engine - and a pungent fuel called gasoline. Soon, cars were spreading across the countryside - their costs falling rapidly, thanks to Henry Ford's assembly lines - and the world was moving toward a heavy dependence on oil.

One casualty of the internal-combustion engine's triumph was the electric car, which had become quite popular in the 1890s. Proclaimed as quieter, cleaner, and simpler than the engine-driven car, the electric vehicle was widely expected to dominate the automotive market of the twentieth century. Instead, it quietly disappeared as automobile companies chose to pour billions of dollars into developing, and incrementally improving, the internal combustion engine. The electric auto, it seemed, was destined for the scrap heap of technological wrong turns.

It may have taken a century, but suddenly the electric car has returned from the dead. Its comeback has been fueled in large part by the engine-induced smog now filling urban areas like Athens, Bangkok, and Los Angeles - just as the manure piling up in the streets of America's cities a hundred years ago prodded the search for alternatives to the horsedrawn carriage. After years of false starts and heated debate, electric cars are on the road again: already an estimated 7,500 "engineless carriages" are now in use worldwide.

The most telling sign of life for this comeback invention came last December with the appearance of General Motors' long-awaited electric sports car, the EV1, in Saturn showrooms in southern California and Arizona. With its high-profile launch, the world's biggest automaker joined a rapidly growing list of companies around the world marketing, or set to market, electric cars - among them Honda, Mercedes, Peugeot, and Renault. These giants will do battle with a quickly growing army of some 250 entrepreneurial startups, each with visions of becoming the next Henry Ford.

While the electric cars on the market so far are expensive and can only travel limited distances, they are taking carmakers in new directions. With the push of government mandates soon to be overtaken by the pull of market opportunities, the drive to produce the most practical, economical electric car is quickly becoming a competitive auto race. As Michael Gage, President of CALSTART, a California electric vehicle consortium, puts it, "We are entering the tornado."

The Whirring Nineties

This time it was a maker of flying machines, Paul MacCready, who got the creaky wheels of car innovation turning. MacCready, inventor of the first human-powered aircraft to fly across the English Channel - a bicycle-like device that earned him "engineer of the century" plaudits from his contemporaries - had designed a solar-powered car, the Sunraycer, for GM. In 1987, the Sunraycer won the first Solar Challenge race, crossing Australia on the equivalent of five gallons of gasoline. GM then asked MacCready's firm, AeroVironment, to build a concept electric car for the company.

Three years later, the resulting prototype - called the Impact - was greeted with such unexpected plaudits at a Los Angeles auto show that then-President Jack Smith brashly vowed to begin mass-producing the car immediately. In doing so, he gave this second automotive revolution a much-needed push. The actual jumpstart came later that year, when the California Air Resources Board - at the time facing worsening air pollution in Los Angeles and other cities, and greatly encouraged by GM's vow - passed the toughest auto emissions standards in the world. Most notable was the industry-shaking requirement that 2 percent of cars sold in the state by the seven major carmakers in 1998 be "zero-emission," with the share rising to 10 percent by 2003.

Auto-industry lobbyists immediately turned on their own creation and - joined by the oil industry - began a bitter fight to roll back the electric car mandate. At times, it seemed some of these companies had devoted more money to badmouthing zero-emission cars than to designing them. This certainly appeared to be the case for Chrysler, whose chairman - in the midst of scaling back its program - went so far as to declare, "There is absolutely no economic basis for electric vehicles in the world."

Eventually, the lobbying paid off, and California legislators lifted the 1998 mandate. But the big automakers are still required to make the more stringent 10 percent target in 2003, which means that some 800,000 zero-emissions cars should be on...