I know a better name!

Or my company!

Biographies

This section of the archive will collect information about EV pioneers. As an example, here is a list of some materials I collected from the basement of Bob Wing's beautiful home in Inverness, California. We think Bob is a great pioneer in the EV movement, but he's also a friend of the EVonline project, so maybe we're biased. We know that there are many, many important figures in the rise of the EV over the course of the past 35 years. Tell us about other EV pioneers -- who are they and what should the world know about them? Where are their papers and records so that we can ask them to contribute to EVOnline?

• Bob Wing
• Ed Rannberg
• Bob Beaumont
• Walter Laski

How can you talk about the history of electric vehicles without looking at the history of the actual technologies and systems that made them go? We would like to create a family of timelines chronicling key developments in the history of the electric vehicle. To get us started, Northeastern University urban historian Clay McShane has generously offered to let us use selections from his forthcoming chronology of the history of the automobile.

What technology or system do you think we should examine? What's important about it? Tell us how it helped you solve a specific problem or set of problems? Tell us what you think, for instance, about hybrids -- should hybrids be considered part of the EV story?

Electric Vehicle Producers and EV Industry

Company histories are especially important for understanding how technologies emerge. We would like to collect as much information as possible about all the relevant participants in the EV industry. We are still working on collecting baseline information about the sources and suppliers of the EV market. As we proceed, we'll update this section and announce it in the What's New page.

EV Diaries

Help us capture what it's like to actually build, own, and drive an electric car -- the feel of the road, the curious stares, the innumerable questions asked. How did you get yours, and how do you use it? Tell us as much or as little as you want, and we'll collect everyone's accounts for posterity.

If you are an EV owner and driver and have not yet filled out the EV Pioneer Survey, please take a few minutes now to do so. To get an idea of what other people are writing today, try visiting Dave and Jean Kodama's EV-1 Chronicles or reading one of John Wayland's Red Beastie story.

EVs outside the United States

The primary aim of EVonline is to study the history of electric vehicles in the United States, but we know that both EVs and the web are global technologies. Contributors with knowledge about the history of electric vehicles in other countries are most welcome. We will cross-reference all submissions with the relevant domestic archive headings, so if you know something about the history of an Australian EV club or a British EV pioneer or a Japanese EV manufacturer, send it in, and we'll add it to EVOnline.