The history of ecofriendly cars

The history of ecofriendly cars is surprisingly long. Admittedly in the early days it wasn't really about being environmentally friendly so much as it was about developing a working car. Nevertheless electric cars and hybrids have been around for decades, although it is only in the last few years that they have started to become widely used.

Ecofriendly cars have a history that goes back right to the invention of the automobile itself. Some of the first cars were electric as designers experimented with all kinds of different power sources. When the car was first invented it was by no means clear that the internal combustion engine would be the best way to power a car. As a result cars were made that were powered by steam, electricity and a whole host of other technologies. However in the early twentieth century it became clear that the internal combustion engine would win out and almost all cars for the next ninety years were built with them.

One of the other early technologies that was used in developing the early cars was hybrid power. Most people think of this as being a new technology but it was actually developed by Ferdinand Porsche back in 1900. Over the next thirty years there were several experimenters who developed cars using hybrid engines but none of them really took off. Again this was down the dominance of the internal combustion engine. Gasoline was cheap and readily available so there was really no reason to change. As a result there would little development of ecofriendly cars for the next several decades.

Ecofriendly cars really wouldn't start to reappear in a major way until the 1970's. To a certain extent they existed in the early days after World War Two in Europe and japan as a shortages of fuel made small fuel efficient cars popular. However the real development of fuel efficient cars would occur during the fuel shortage of the seventies. During this period most of the cars that were produced were small fuel efficient vehicles. There was also a renewed interest in electric vehicles although due to practical problems they never really took off in popularity.

It was during the seventies that the car makers started looking into using hybrid technology as well. However but the later part of the decade the fuel shortage ended and the price of gas plummeted so work on hybrids stopped with no cars actually being built. They would not start to appear until the late nineties when environmental concerns would lead the car makers to start producing them. The first to appear was the Toyota Prius in 1997. Nowadays almost all car makers offer at least part of their line up with a hybrid option. In addition the cars that are not hybrids are much more fuel efficient than they were just a few years ago.