Electric car pioneers: meet the people behind the EV revolution

Like all human endeavours, the progress of the electric car industry has depended on the people who found ways to move it forward from the state in which they found it.

Those pioneers have been very different, and done quite different things, but they have all played their part.

Here are 21 examples (including one pair we feel should be mentioned jointly) who we will introduce in alphabetical order of their surnames.

William Anderson

Anderson made his name producing horse-drawn carriages (whose buyers were expected to supply their own horse) and moved into the burgeoning field of electric cars in 1907. Detroit Electric, as his company became known, was very successful for several years, and remained in business even after the internal combustion engine became the dominant power source in the industry.

In fact, Detroit Electric survived until shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, long after the EV industry had entered its dark age.

Walter Baker

Detroit Electric’s success was even more impressive given that it entered a market dominated in the US by the Baker Motor Vehicle Company. Walter Baker’s business was one of the first of its type in the nation, having been established right at the end of the 19th century.

After a dazzling few years, it faded away in the mid 1910s, but Baker was not responsible for that, since by then he had moved on to work for General Electric.

Count Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat

Son of a politican and brother of a president of the French fencing federation, this aristocrat did not invent an electric car himself, but did a great deal to popularise them.

As works driver (as we would say now) for Jeantaud, he set the first official Land Speed Record of 39.24mph in December 1898, and regained the title twice during a battle with Camille Jenatzy before Jenatzy finally put it beyond reach.

Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning

In the mid 1990s, Californians Eberhard (pictured) and Tarpenning co-founded NuvoMedia, which produced one of the earliest e-book readers.

They teamed up again a decade later to create a company which developed an electric sports car based on the second-generation Lotus Elise. Named after the brilliant Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla (who wasn’t involved because he died in 1943), it has gone on to become one of the most famous EV companies in the world.

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Charles Jeantaud

Jeantaud is believed to have built an experimental electric car as early as 1881, and followed this up with several production models of various types.

He died by his own hand in 1906, but thanks to his own technical ability, and to the driving skills of Gaston de Chasseloup-Laubat, he is remembered as the constructor of the first vehicle ever to hold the Land Speed Record.

Camille Jenatzy

Chasseloup-Laubat’s great rival in the early days of record breaking was a Belgian driver famous for his results in petrol-fuelled Mercedes cars. His third and final successful attempt on the Land Speed Record was at the wheel of the electric La Jamais Contente, which he built himself, and in which he also won one of the first ever competitive hillclimb events.

This was the first LSR car to break the 100km/h barrier (it was measured at 105.88km/h, or 65.79mph), and it held the record for nearly three years.

Adolf Kalberlah

Kalberlah led the team which, from 1970, developed all-electric versions of Volkswagen’s T2 van and campervan, known as the Elektro-Transporter and Elektro-Bus respectively.

Although a few were sold, they were too impractical to be commercially successful (not least because the battery pack weighed about as much as a VW Beetle), and Kalberlah knew it. They did, however, mark the company’s entry into the modern era of electric vehicles, from the limited-production Golf CitySTROMer of 1981 to today’s ID models.

William Li

Among many other business achievements, Bin Li, as he is known in China, is the founder, Chairman and CEO of Nio, which is unusual among the several Chinese EV manufacturers in that it was established to build only vehicles of this type.

Its first model, the very fast EP9 sports car, was followed by several more conventional models such as the EL6 mid-size SUV (pictured). Nio’s activity also includes building charging stations, the 700th of which opened in December 2021.

William Morrison

An expatriate Scot based in Des Moines, Iowa, Morrison built several electric vehicles of the horseless carriage type, the first of them seeing the light of day in 1887. The second, completed three years later, is sometimes credited as the first successful electric car made in the US.

Morrison’s activity in the field did not continue into the 20th century, but he can reasonably be described as its American pioneer, even though he was born on the other side of the Atlantic.

Elon Musk

An often controversial figure, Musk did not create Tesla, but he has been in charge of it for nearly two decades, and is the figurehead not only of the company but, in some people’s view, of the electric car industry in general.

History will decide how influential he has really been. There is no question, though, that it is, and will perhaps remain, almost impossible to talk about electric cars of the early 21st century without mentioning him at some point, as we have done here.

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Georg von Opel

Not to be confused with his son, who has the same name, von Opel was the grandson of company founder Adam Opel.

A champion rower and a member of the International Olympic Committee, he developed an ‘elektro’ version of the Opel GT sports car – the first fully battery-powered Opel ever made – and drove it to six world records for electric cars (from a quarter of a mile to 10 miles) in a two-day period in May 1971, three months before dying of a heart attack at the age of 59.

Thomas Parker

Once described as Britain’s equivalent of Thomas Edison, Parker is best known for inventing the smokeless fuel Coalite, but in an astoundingly varied career he also built a series of electric cars in the late 1800s.

Like William Morrison, a contemporary living an ocean away, he soon moved on to other projects, and is therefore not remembered as an EV pioneer to anything like the extent he should be.

Ferdinand Porsche

More than three decades before he created the company which still bears his name today, Ferdinand Porsche worked for the Austrian firm Egger-Lohner, where he developed an electric drivetrain for an 1898 vehicle called the C.2 Phaeton.

This has since been described as the first Porsche car, a claim which is vigorously disputed. What is beyond doubt is that it demonstrates Porsche’s status as a pioneer in the field of electric motoring.

Peter Rawlinson

After stints at Lotus and Jaguar Land Rover, Rawlinson joined Tesla, where he was, in the company’s own words, “responsible for the technical execution and delivery of the Model S”.

He has since become the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Technical Officer of Lucid Motors. Lucid’s first model, the Air (pictured), went on sale in 2021, and was named World Luxury Car of the Year two years later.

Mate Rimac

Still in his 30s, Rimac is the founder and boss of the eponymous company (the best known of the very few based in his home country of Croatia) whose electric vehicles include the phenomenal Nevera hypercar, which has been measured at 258mph.

As a manufacturer, Rimac is part of the same conglomerate as Bugatti. Rimac Technology is a separate company which supplies systems to larger brands including Aston Martin, Ferrari, Jaguar and Porsche.

Robert Scaringe

While other American EV companies of the current era have come and gone very quickly, Scaringe’s Rivian seems set for a bright future. Its first model, the R1T pickup truck, was quickly followed by an SUV derivative called the R1S.

At the recent launch of the smaller R2, which had been known about well in advance, Scaringe pulled off a surprise by unveiling both the R3 crossover and a more off-road focussed version of the same vehicle, which has been named R3X.

Gustave Trouvé

In the absence of much information about Scottish inventor Robert Anderson’s carriage, which is known to have run in the 1830s, credit for the first electric car usually goes to Trouvé, who might be described as Anderson’s French counterpart.

His adapted Coventry tricycle, with one wheel on the left and two much smaller ones on the right, is known to have completed a test run in Paris in April 1881. His work therefore predates that of William Morrison and Thomas Parker, though like them his attention was soon diverted to other matters.

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Phạm Nhật Vượng

Believed to be Vietnam’s first billionaire, Vượng is the founder of the enormous Vingroup conglomerate, which added car production to its portfolio in 2019.

The first models from its VinFast brand were based on existing designs and powered by internal combustion engines, but it has since committed itself entirely to producing electric vehicles, all of which have a warranty of ten years or 200,000km. As well as Vietnam, VinFast is also active in the US and Europe.

Gary Witzenburg

In the 1990s, Witzenburg led the test and development team of the General Motors EV1, which had many new features now common in electric cars.

Now a journalist and author, he has taken pains to contradict several assumptions about the project, and has also given credit to lead development engineer Clive Roberts (brought over from Lotus, which GM owned at the time) and “a trio of brilliant young engineers named Marty Freedman, Garrett Beauregard and Travis Schwenke”.

Masanori Yoshida

Yoshida is the founder of Aspark, whose website speaks of “humble beginnings as a technical development and R&D engineering outsourcing services company”. Now involved in education, website design and app creation, it has also entered the electric vehicle business.

Its first car is the Owl, which Yoshida has described as “the first Japanese electric hypercar”. Similar in performance to the Rimac Nevera, it has four motors with a combined output of nearly 2000bhp, and a 0-62mph time of under two seconds.

By David Finlay