Two years ago, the Twitter profile of the city of Toronto he came up with this news: “How old are electric cars? Believe it or not, 126 years today: on December 5, 1893, the first electric car built at Toronto’s Dixon Carriage rolled out of the factory. He was able to do 15 miles without recharging ”. It was called Still Electric Car, because its inventor was William Joseph Still: he was an English engineer of just 23 who when he was 14 he had landed in Canada to work and had revealed himself to be a prodigious inventor (at the end of his life there will be several patents).
The first electric car it was built, as mentioned, in a factory in Toronto where carriages were made, that of John Dixon. And in fact it was a horse-less carriage. It immediately had a certain success: at the time, the beginnings of the automobile, the electric motor seemed to have an advantage over the steam and gasoline engines. But then things turned out very differently. More than a century will have to pass to rediscover the advantages of a silent, odorless and non-polluting engine.
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