Electric vehicles not so current

What is a hundred years old, has a thousand speeds and is a million times better for the environment? It’s the world’s earliest hybrid vehicle – the Owen Magnetic, which was in development as early as the 1890s.

That’s right, hybrids are not a new technology, having been built as early as 1832. The Owen Magnetic, for example, was also known as ‘The Car of a Thousand Speeds’ as it used a magnetic field to power an electric five-speed automatic transmission.

Sometimes in order to take two steps forward, we should take one step back. In early May we ran an editorial about the green practices that were commonplace 50 years ago. This environmental stuff isn’t new, which should be comforting to a society increasingly pressured to save the environment by adopting new lifestyles and habits.

Today, government and industry spend millions of dollars every year on researching and developing new technologies that mitigate damage to the environment. But the Owen Magnetic seems to prove that sometimes when it comes to innovation we need to look no further than the rearview mirror.