Henry Ford made ambitious plans to develop a battery-powered version of his Model T and produce electric flivvers by the millions, but the scheme quickly fell apart. 

Fueled in part by the enthusiastic public response to the Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning introductions, Ford has gone all in on electric vehicles. The Dearborn  automaker had already pledged to invest $22 billion in EV technology and new products by 2025, including a $500 million stake in electric truck startup Rivian, and it will share Volkswagen’s Modular Electric Drive architecture on an EV for Europe in 2023.

Of course, with a company as old as the Ford Motor Company—118 years and counting as of this writing—you can usually find a historical precedent or parallel for most any news the company can announce. And sure enough, this is not the company’s first venture into the electric vehicle market. In 1914, Henry Ford announced an ambitious program to produce a battery-electric version of the Model T, but the plan quickly fell apart.

One good place to start the electric flivver saga is with the pair of 1914 Model 47 Detroit Electrics pictured above. The one on the left was purchased by Henry Ford for his wife Clara, while the one on the right was acquired by famed inventor Thomas Edison, shown here lifting the hood. (Both examples still exist, by the way.) While the gasoline automobile had asserted its supremacy over steam and electric by that time, there was still a small but solid market for electric cars, for they were dependable, utterly silent, and clean and easy to operate. Detroit was one of the more popular makes, and while its top speed was a modest 20 mph, its 80-mile range was more than adequate for the typical buyers: well-heeled, city-dwelling ladies like Mrs. Ford, who drove a succession of three electric cars over the years.

Edison’s interest in the Detroit Electric was commercial. The renowned developer of the phonograph and the electric lamp was also a proponent of the nickel-iron (NiFe) battery as a replacement for the conventional lead-acid battery, and he held several patents in that area. (Invented in France, nickel-iron batteries were commonly known as Edison cells in the USA.) Edison’s nickel-iron battery was a $600 factory option on the Detroit Electric, which had a base price of around $3100, and both the Ford and Edison cars were equipped with the extra-cost Edison batteries.

Meanwhile: As every car enthusiast surely knows, Ford was a tremendous admirer of Edison, who had encouraged Ford’s automotive experiments early on. (Ford had worked as an engineer at a Detroit powerplant of the Edison Illuminating Co. while building his first car.) By 1914, Ford had become the world’s largest automaker, and around that time Ford decided it was time to return the favor to his idol and mentor and throw the weight of his growing empire behind Edison’s efforts to promote the nickel-iron battery. Alongside the carmaker’s gasoline-powered Model T, Ford would offer an electric car powered by Edison cells. Grand plans were announced, and a large parcel of land for a factory was secured near the giant Ford plant on Woodward Avenue in Highland Park, just north of Detroit.

Shown above in front of the Highland Park office building is an early prototype for the electric flivver. A simple ladder frame with upturned horns at each end supports the running gear: an electric motor mounted at the rear axle, four wire wheels, and a rack of batteries mounted under the seat. Steering is via tiller, a common feature on electric cars of the day.

Pictured below is a more advanced prototype sporting a 1914 Michigan license plate. Note that the chassis frame, front axle and suspension, steering column assembly, seat, and other hardware are all production Model T components. The electric motor is mounted under the open cockpit, driving a propeller shaft and inverted worm-gear rear axle. This electric runabout is, for most intents and purposes, a Model T Ford but with an electric powertrain. At one point a price as low as $500 was proposed, nearly the same as the gasoline version.

By the way, the heavy-set man shown at the controls of both prototypes is Fred Allison, one of the company’s top electrical experts and instrumental in developing the Model T’s self-starter. According to Ford’s notorious henchman Harry Bennett in his memoir, We Never Called Him Henry, Ford eventually became so extreme in his crackpot beliefs about diet and nutrition that he developed a physical revulsion to overweight people. Ford found Allison’s very appearance so repugnant that he devised various ways to belittle and torment the engineer. As Bennett told the story, Allison actually starved himself to death trying to lose weight and regain Ford’s favor.

While the prototypes seemed to work well enough, in Ford’s view they had a fatal flaw.  His development crew had been unable to get the Edison batteries to perform as required. While nickel-iron batteries have a long service life, they are slow to charge, produce less voltage per cell, and as we’ve already seen, are considerably more expensive. To move the project along, the team substituted ordinary lead-acid batteries, and at that point Ford’s patience reached its limit. Without the Edison batteries, the electric flivver no longer had any reason to exist, in Ford’s mind anyway. After a reported expenditure of $1.5 million, mainly in Edison batteries, Henry pulled the plug.