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As gas cars began to hit the streets of Toronto, the city was already an EV manufacturing hub
Dumaresq de Pencier is the exhibit and project coordinator for the Canadian Automotive Museum in Oshawa, Ont.
While Tesla may be credited with popularizing modern electric vehicles, they are far from being the first to develop an EV. And I'm not talking about General Motors's EV1 from 1996.
EVs appeared decades before the first gas-powered car, going back nearly 200 years. And around the time gas cars began hitting the streets of Toronto the city was already an EV manufacturing hub.
From 1893 to 1913, four Canadian companies and one American company built or tried to build electric vehicles in the Greater Toronto Area. Two of these companies still exist, though most people likely wouldn't recognize them today.
In an era when gasoline engines were a novelty and steam power was inconvenient for automobile use, electrics were the next big thing.
British engineer William Joseph Still was an inventor of steam and electrical technologies whose patent batteries sold well on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1890s.
In 1893, he approached Toronto patent lawyer Frederick Barnard Fetherstonhaugh with a new lightweight battery design. The two had already worked together for several years and Fetherstonhaugh, a tinkerer and inventor himself, thought the new battery would be perfect for an electric automobile.
Fetherstonhaugh worked with Still and the Toronto-based Dixon Carriage Company at the corner of Bay and Temperance Streets to build the car. It was a 320-kilogram technological marvel that could manage an hour of driving at 24 kilometres an hour. This speed was comparable or even slightly faster than most passenger cars being introduced at the time.
Fetherstonhaugh used it as his daily driver for 15 years, charging it at his home in southwest Toronto neighbourhood of Mimico and demonstrating it at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1893, 1896 and 1906. The vehicle vanished from the historical record after the 1912 Toronto Auto Show.
In 1897, Still established the Canadian Motor Syndicate to build and sell his car designs. The company's first vehicle was an electric delivery tricycle, shown at the 1898 Canadian National Exhibition. By 1899, Still had invented a more efficient electric motor, better suited for large vehicles.
His business was reorganized as the Still Motor Company Limited (SMC) and began selling vehicles in earnest. Its factory on Yonge Street was a hive of activity, helped by one of the City of Toronto's first commercial telephone lines.
SMC generally didn't build vehicles from scratch; clients brought them commercial carriages, which the factory retrofitted with motors and batteries. Parker's Dye Works (known today as Parker's Dry Cleaning) was an early adopter and, by 1900, many of Toronto's biggest industrial and commercial concerns had at least one or two SMC vehicles in their fleets.
SMC electrics were light, reasonably fast and easy to control, but almost all of them were custom jobs, resulting in high costs and low profits for the company.
Financial support came in the form of a buyout from a group of British investors who renamed the company Canadian Motors Limited (CML). In late 1899, Still had developed a moderately successful line of two- and four-seater passenger electrics: the Ivanhoes and the Oxfords.
The new owners wanted to sell them in England and CML became the first British-owned car company in Canada and Canada's first car exporter.
The company sent dozens of vehicles to England in late 1900 and early 1901, but CML's success in British road trials didn't equate to sales. By 1904, the organization was shuttered on both sides of the Atlantic and Still had moved on to other more lucrative projects.
The CML factory in Toronto didn't remain closed for long. In 1903, it was bought by bicycle manufacturing conglomerate Canadian Cycle & Motor Company, which turned it over to the manufacturer of an American electric car, also named the Ivanhoe. These vehicles never sold well and in 1905 the company dropped the brand to focus primarily on gasoline cars.
A small side business making hockey equipment under the brand 'CCM' would prosper and still exists today.
These Canadian manufacturers had competition. The Fischer Equipment Company of Chicago demonstrated its twin-engine Woods Electric cars and trucks in Toronto in 1898, gaining so much interest that by 1899 the whole enterprise had reorganized as the Woods Motor Vehicle Company.
This company had a mostly Canadian board of directors that included representatives from Canadian General Electric, the Dominion Bank and Canadian Pacific Railways. Woods cars were planned to be built at the General Electric plant in Hamilton, which would provide Toronto with an electric taxi network.
Woods shifted its focus south of the border in 1901 and kept producing electrics in the U.S. until 1918.
Canadian demand for electric cars continued. In 1911, the wealthy McLaughlin Motorcar Company of Oshawa began marketing luxury electric cars on the American Rauch & Lang chassis across southern Ontario. There were plans to build the cars in 1912, but it is unclear if those plans materialized. Within a few years, McLaughlin would become General Motors Canada, though the company has yet to attempt EV production in Oshawa a second time.
A smaller-scale local contender was the Peck electric, built on Jarvis Street and marketed at the 1912 Auto Show as the car that 'Keeps Pecking.' Despite cushy interiors, easy-to-use controls and lavish colour ads in the pages of Motoring Magazine, the car's whopping $4,000 sale price – more than $109,000 in today's dollars – was a deterrent, and the company folded in 1913.
It would take around a century, and dramatic improvements in technology, for EVs to return to Toronto. Still, every electric car driven on our streets today forms the latest link in a chain that extends back in time more than a century to the era of steam and brass.
