You know what’s great about the internet? Other than the very real possibilities of seeing your cherished childhood cartoon favorites engaging in extremely depraved sexual experiments? The incredible ability of the internet to spread complete horseshit around the globe, clad in the respectable garments of fact. There’s one “fact” that I’d like to talk about today, because it’s one I’ve seen referenced for years, off and on, and has been so subtly pervasive that I had to take a moment to remember if it was actually true or not. It’s the story of Nikola Tesla’s electric car.
Now here’s the thing about the idea of Nikola Tesla building an electric car: it could have happened. Just that basic premise itself isn’t really all that unbelievable. After all, the first electric car was built in 1832 by Scottish inventor Robert Anderson, and during the late 1800s and early 1900s electric cars were a viable competitor to both gasoline and steam vehicles. Each power source was a viable contender, and electric cars, even in their early, crude, lead-acid-battery state, had some real advantages over steam or gas cars, being cleaner and quieter and far less likely to break your arm while starting it.
I even once made a whole explainer video about this early era of EVs:
Even the famous inventor Thomas Edison, one of Nikola Tesla’s great rivals, was experimenting with and building electric cars in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
So, with this in mind, it certainly would have been possible for Tesla to have built some sort of battery-powered EV. The timeline associated with Tesla’s alleged electric car, around 1931, would certainly be plausible, and would even be a little bit late, as gasoline had clearly become the car fuel of choice by then.
This is why I always have to pause when I hear this story. Did Tesla build an EV? The way the story is usually told, that the car was built from a converted 1931 Pierce-Arrow, just makes everything more plausible, as he’s not even building a whole car from scratch; he’d just be converting a gasoline car to electricity.
These were handsome cars, the late ’20s-early ’30s Pierce-Arrows. They pioneered fairing the headlights into the fenders, which I think looked pretty fetching.
Anyway, if the whole rumor was just that Tesla took a Pierce-Arrow, yanked the gasoline drivetrain out, and stuck in some batteries and Tesla’s own AC motors, I think I’d at least file this in my brain under the “plausible” category, even if there weren’t any photographs or remains of the vehicle or anything like that.
But, of course, nothing is that simple.
No, because of the strange mythos that surrounds Nikola Tesla and his works, it’s not enough that he may have just built an electric car. No, that’s not what this pervasive myth is about. It’s about Tesla building a car that pulled its power right out of thin air.
This description of the car shows up frequently online, and is allegedly from a book written by Arthur Abrom called The Forgotten Art of Electric-Powered Automobiles, which, it’s worth noting, is an art not forgotten:
“But, back to our electric automobiles — in 1931, under the financing of Pierce-Arrow and George Westinghouse, a 1931 Pierce-Arrow was selected to be tested at the factory grounds in Buffalo, NY. The standard internal combustion engine was removed and an 80-hp 1800 rpm electric motor installed to the clutch and transmission. The AC motor measured 40 inches long and 30 inches in diameter and the power leads were left standing in the air — no external power source!
At the appointed time, Nikola Tesla arrived from New York City and inspected the Pierce-Arrow automobile. He then went to a local radio store and purchased a handful of tubes (12), wires and assorted resistors. A box measuring 24 inches long, 12 inches wide and 6 inches high was assembled housing the circuit. The box was placed on the front seat and had its wires connected to the air-cooled, brushless motor. Two rods 1/4″ in diameter stuck out of the box about 3” in length.
Mr. Tesla got into the driver’s seat, pushed the two rods in and stated, “We now have power”. He put the car into gear and it moved forward! This vehicle, powered by an AC motor, was driven to speeds of 90 mph. and performed better than any internal combustion engine of its day! One week was spent testing the vehicle. Several newspapers in Buffalo reported this test. When asked where the power came from, Tesla replied, “From the ethers all around us”. Several people suggested that Tesla was mad and somehow in league with sinister forces of the universe. He became incensed, removed his mysterious box from the vehicle and returned to his laboratory in New York City. His secret died with him!
It is speculated that Nikola Tesla was able to somehow harness the earth’s magnetic field that encompasses our planet. And, he somehow was able to draw tremendous amounts of power by cutting these lines of force or causing them to be multiplied together. The exact nature of his device remains a mystery but it did actually function by powering the 80 hp AC motor in the Pierce Arrow at speeds up to 90 m.p.h. and no recharging was ever necessary!”
So, yeah, somehow the Pierce-Arrow was powered by harvesting energy from the “ether,” a mythical miasma of energy that some people believed fills the universe. Most modern cosmological models do not support this idea, at all, though some theories attempting to explain dark matter and unify physics have dragged this old concept back for re-consideration, sort of.
Practically, though, there is no evidence anything like the ether exists, and there sure as hell is no evidence that free energy can jusr be extracted from it with an antenna, allowing for 90 mph travel for free.
A lot of these stories seem to originate with interviews conducted in the late 1960s with Peter Savo, who claimed to be a nephew of Tesla. It does not seem that he actually was, and his claims of seeing the car in operation in Buffalo, NY appear to be fiction.
There’s other versions of the Tesla electric car story out there; in 1986 Arthur Matthews, who was Tesla’s assistant for a time and wrote a book in the 1940s about Tesla, made this claim about a Tesla electric car:
“And the battery, when installed in this electric car, will run that car five hundred miles before the battery needs to be attended to. And when the battery does need to be attended to it would take you ten minutes to remedy whatever is going on and the spare parts are all in the trunk. You have enough spare parts to keep that battery running twelve months of the year. You do not have to stop at the service station. You could run five hundred miles…..at seventy-five miles per hour……across the country and probably not have to stop more than fifteen minutes to attend to the batteries…”
In this description, the car does have a battery, albeit one with a 500 mile range and only needs to be “attended to” for 15 minute sessions, somehow.
This also appears to be, charitably, bullshit.
So where did all of this fantastical stuff come from? I think there’s a few sources. First, there’s all the experiments Tesla did with the wireless transmission of electricity via electromagnetic waves, including his never-completed Wardenclyffe Tower that would have attempted to broadcast electricity over the electromagnetic spectrum in large quantities.
These experiments were real, and he did manage to broadcast electricity over the air. But that’s a far cry from tapping into a source of free energy that just fills the universe, as the car stories usually suggest. There have been other stories of cars that just pull power from the air, like what’s being described in this 1921 article from the Arizona Republican:
These ideas had been flitting around a while, and Tesla just made an ideal anchor to hang them all on, with his vaguely related actual research and his status as an iconoclastic inventor who was unfairly wronged and ignored by “the establishment.”
The takeaway here, though, is that the Laws of Thermodynamics still stand, at least in this house, and the rumors of Tesla building an electric car that pulls energy from the air, are, of course, horseshit. It doesn’t even seem like he built any electric cars at all, despite likely having been capable.
Sorry to burst any bubbles, but there’s no free energy to be pulled from the air. Now, a magic smelt that you can throw in your car’s gas tank that will excrete 93 octane fuel forever, that may be true. At least, I’ve yet to see it disproven.
Is that why California made the effort to save the smelt?
Sounds to me like they got it to 90 mph with no connection to a power source by rolling it off a cliff
Certainly the simplest way to harness Earth’s gravitational field.
This BS story would have been way more plausible if the car had some kind of direct ground connection (“grounded to the ground”, if you will).
Tesla did demonstrate wireless power at Colorado Springs, and the results were well-documented (and have been repeated in the modern era), but those experiments had light bulbs and other such loads connected to earth.
If I was going to make up a semi-plausible “Tesla car” story, I’d have said there was some kind of inverse pantograph (like electric trains have) that gave the car a direct metal connection to some kind of metal strip in the road, which was then earth grounded.
Then it’s basically the same as bumper cars or electric trains, but instead of receiving power from a metal plate or overhead cable, it receives it from a powerful Tesla coil.
Still BS, but a lot more believable in light of actual Tesla experiments and other electric transport technology.
The problem with Tesla’s transmission idea is how do you make people pay for it. Of course he didn’t care, he worked for Westinghouse, not the utility companies.
But Big Electricity wasn’t having any unregulated power transmission..
Metering could have been addressed, especially back then where something as complicated as a Tesla coil bordered on the magical and wasn’t something the average joe could reverse engineer and pirate.
Just put a normal electric meter after a home’s wireless receiver. Sure, just like cable boxes, eventually people would figure out how to pirate it, but meter bypassing happens today too.
I’m usually highly skeptical of “Big XXX Corp squashed this idea” conspiracies because as powerful as some entities are, good ideas will eventually prevail somewhere. If wireless power was really as effective as Tesla made it out to be, someone else in the last 100 years would have capitalized on it.
back then where something as complicated as a Tesla coil bordered on the magical
Yes, but also no. Remember there was no TV, I wouldn’t underestimate the cleverness of the average person. I mean at one point there were some 120 US Motorcycle companies, smart motivated people were out there.
I’m usually highly skeptical of “Big XXX Corp squashed this idea”
Oh 100%, I think in terms of modern capitalization, inertia is a thing. A certain person is pushing to increase coal usage like it’s 1899. Coal, a fossil fuel that should have gone out with the Beatles.
You don’t need an earth connection, we use the same ideas today for wireless charging. For a car though you’d need a big receiving antenna, which has to be physically close (and aligned with the transmitter), probably built into the road itself. If you’re going to that extent though, you might as well just use overhead wires like a train or tram.
Tubes and resistors?
Gee if someone is going to make up a story, I think capacitors ( condensers back then) and inductors would be part of the story.
Anyway, you can grab electrical energy out of the air, or vacuum for that matter, but not in the quantities to move a Pierce Arrow.
A crystal radio is harvesting ambient electrical energy and converting it to mechanical energy, it just doesn’t scale well.
I always wondered what would have happened if they had ever turned the Wardenclyffe Tower on, but I bet it would have been an epic mess.
Tesla did operate a coal mine that I drove by just an hour ago, at what is now the Carnegie motorcycle park
https://ohv.parks.ca.gov/?page_id=25689
It’s across the road from where they test the chemical explosive part of thermonuclear weapons.
https://sd.llnl.gov/facilities/hydrodynamic-explosives-testing/site-300-experimental-test-site
There used to be an explosion every day at noon that was house shaking loud. If there was an explosion at any other time, you knew it was unplanned and probably bad.
Ok, first, look up what a modern 80hp 3phase motor weighs, then check out the torque figure.
Ie: if installed, the Pierce Arrow would have completely bottomed out the front end. If started, that motor would have twisted that driveline like licorice. Variable Frequency Drives were invented so that motors could be started up & run at less than full speed. Modern VFDs aren’t that big-just expensive. Back then, they were big & heavy too.
That said, if he actually >could< pull power from thin air, one would assume he could modulate it. Sadly, there’s no evidence this was the case at any useful distance or scale—as noted in the article.
—I put this in that pile in the corner along with recent reports there’s a 2km deep power station under Khufu’s pyramid : cool story, brah 😉
Is it a coincidence that today, Star Wars Day (May the 4th be with you!), we get a story about a car powered by something that sounds an awful lot like The Force?
Does anyone have the inside scoop on old Nikola’s midichlorian count?
Would that make Edison a Sith lord? By most historical accounts he fits the profile, and Green Mile-ing an elephant seems a very Darthy thing to do.
On a side note, the Pierce-Arrow Museum in Buffalo is definitely worth a visit if you ever find yourself in the neighborhood.
Tesla’s secret was discovered years later by the makers of Fuel Shark.
It’s the transmission and clutch that pull the electricity out of the aether
This article says to me that bullshit is like energy. It can never be destroyed. As long as someone is around to fall for it, it’ll come back again.
A perpetual motion device at least
Tesla had a teleportation device, what would he need a car for? That’s how you know this is bullshit. /s
Hey ai have the working Nikola Tesla EV in my garage, my grandma used to tend to him at the end of his life. Is it worth something.
There is considerable evidence that Martians can extract electrical energy from thin air. That’s why Musk is in such a hurry to get there and colonize them. Also, they are very, very binary and identify as such.
Does solar count?
Nothing can be free. Nature always balances the books.
1st law of thermodynamics:
there is no free lunch
2nd law of thermodynamics:
the tip is included in your bill
Reading about the battery only needing to be “attended to every 500 miles” and “taking 15 minutes” reads less to me like recharging it, more like replacing the electrolyte or cleaning/replacing the anodes and cathodes, which makes it sound far more plausible.
I’ve read unsubstantiated reports if it being a zinc air battery, but there is no way that could make enough power to push the car to 90 mph with any known product to have existed back then or since.
The “attend to the battery with spare parts in the trunk” would suggest some kind of electrolyte replenishment and fresh anodes, yeah.
Public charging stations and battery swapping existed in the early 1900s though (lots of fleet delivery vehicles were electric), so if any of this was real, I would expect Nikola Tesla would have worked to optimize those.
I’ve heard crazy theories he had micro nuke reactor and that he was was in Colorado springs to get material.
Now, Tesla just pulls things out of its CEO’s ass … er, imagination.
Filed under “you can’t make this shit up”
In January 1943, John G.Trump was asked by the U.S. Office of Alien Property Custodian to examine the notes, papers, and artifacts left by the inventor Nikola Tesla, who had died two days prior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_G._Trump
Interesting guy,
Apparently he used up all the intellectual prowess for the lineage.
You can pull free energy from the air, wind turbines are real.
Also I think there is a way to harness microwatts of energy from stray wireless signals.
There are wireless power systems but they typically require a dedicated transmitter, and can only deliver small amounts of power. Enough to run things like RFID tags, toll collection tags, that kind of thing. Without a transmitter relatively nearby, any signals you would capture incidentally would be very low power. Cell phones, for example, work with receive levels on the order of nanowatts.
Things like Qi chargers can transmit something like 15W, but they use magnetic induction and therefore need the transmitter and receiver to be much closer.
Hey sent you a copy of a Tesla EV it was prevalent in Eureka. But it is a secret military program so you aren’t familiar with it.
I’m still marveling at that Pierce Arrow doing 75 mph on 80 hp. That’s an awfully heavy brick to be pushing through the air at those speeds with that Cd. Maybe those old skinny tires have a lot lower rolling resistance than I’m expecting.
*professional driver on a 20-mile downhill closed course, prepared road surface (ice)*
…do not attempt.
Your top speed is mostly limited by aero drag, mass doesn’t really come in to it.
I used to hit 70mph all the time in my 29bhp 2CV with its 1930’s aero. So 75mph with 80bhp actually sounds slow.
It’s a shame about Tesla, he developed AC power and helped harness Niagara Falls as was his dream, but then became a wackadoodle, Edison slandering him around wasn’t any help either.
The Tesla coil is cool but not practical for much but special effects, Wardenclyffe wouldn’t have worked either. If he hadn’t have succeeded so much earlier on his later projects probably wouldn’t have gotten as far as they did, and he still died broke so there’s that.
The real shame is the usurping his name for multiple Electric vehicle companies. What’s the statute of limitations on that? I feel like it needs to be over 100 years.
Geez, that’s sounding a bit familiar. Maybe the Tesla name is cursed.
I seem to recall a story that Edison fried a live elephant in public to demonstrate that Tesla’s AC power was unsafe to use.
It was truly wild times back then.
Yah, there was an ideological and PR battle (influenced by the patents the various combatants held) over DC (Edison) vs. AC (Westinghouse, Tesla). As late as the 1960s they were still making AC/DC radios that would work on either. I think DC was still found in some parts of New York City (Edison’s former turf).
I had a girlfriend who lived in a building on the corner of Stanton and Christie Street the lower east side that still had DC as late at 1986.
If you plugged anything into a DC outlet that had a transformer it would catch fire. I think ConEdison stopped selling DC in the late 1990s. There were lots of DC elevators that had to be replaced then. The subway still runs on DC.
And of course modern EV “rapid chargers” run DC as well bypassing the EVs own internal inverter when high voltage is detected
It’s true. The elephant’s name was Tospy. The story is much weirder and crueler that just that. (Bob’s Burgers link as a palate cleanser)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)
https://bobs-burgers.fandom.com/wiki/Topsy
The car for Breatharians. I’ll keep my 100 mpg carburetor, thank you very much.