Car Guy Magazine Car Guy Magazine Issue 914 | Page 18

I

You don’t need to go to a fashion show to discover
that green is the season’s hottest color. Nearly every
car manufacturer wants you to buy their latest fuelsaving, low emissions, zero carbon footprint model.

WORDS ANDREW GANZ
PHOTOS GLENN ZANOTTI

16 CarGuyMagazine.com

n the early 20th century, many mostly female driving pioneers were onto
something automotive that was only marginally less environmentally
friendly than a bicycle: Electric cars.
These mostly forgotten tall cars – they look more like horseless coaches
than anything else ever to move under its own power – were all the rage
back in the early 1900s, well before the notion of a fuel miser had slipped
into any car nut’s mind. Dozens of electric car producers sprung up across
the United States from the turn of the century until the Great Depression, the
most widely known of which was Anderson Electric Car Company’s Detroit
Electric brand. But Detroit Electric wasn’t the only battery-powered automotive innovator in its day.
Just an hour’s drive today from Detroit is West Bancroft Street in Toledo,
Ohio, once home to the Ohio Electric Car Company, producers of some of the
most elegant and upscale electric coaches marekted primarily to high society
women.
Ohio Electric produced just under 1,000 cars, according to historians, from
1910-1918, but just a handful are known to remain today. Only one, our very original feature vehicle, a 1914
Ohio Electric Model 40 Dresden Brougham, is known
to be in running condition.
During their production run, Ohio Electric cars
were distributed throughout the eastern United States
and Canada. While all electric cars were play toys of the
wealthy and were targeted at women, Ohio Electric’s
cars were among the most opulent. With features like
curved glass – an expensive piece to manufacture –
elegant silk window curtains, roll-up shades and even
an included toilet kit, few luxury features were left out.
Internal combustion automobiles were dirty devices in the early days of motoring. Hand cranks that
required substantial muscle to turn, sooty exhaust
and oil leaking from every possible seal, made them
decidedly un-ladylike transportation devices, by turnof-the-century standards. This, of course, was an era
where society women wouldn’t want to be in the
public’s eye with even a speck of oil on their clothing
or a whiff of gasoline fumes. Electric cars provided a perfect solution since
they required no more than the switch of a lever to turn on and off and they
lacked any need for an exhaust system. In addition, they were quiet to run, so
leisurely conversation inside was easy to maintain.
Ohio Electric marketed its electric automobiles exclusively to women,
as evidenced by the dearth of men in advertisements. The only male figures
shown are doormen at hotels. Instead, the advertisements feature women
engaging in activities deemed appropriate