You might not think about it very often,
but we are living through a golden age of technology.
Our homes and our pockets are full of inventions and gadgets
that 20 years ago would have been the stuff of science-fiction.
Alexa, how exactly do you work?
Hmm... I don't know that. That's what we're going to find out.
These things have become such an integral part of our everyday
lives that we've forgotten to remember how clever they are.
I'm Professor Hannah Fry and I want to open your eyes...
I'm having a great time. ..to the secret genius of everyday objects.
BEEPS The ones that we take for granted.
Items that owe their existence
to generations of scientific innovation.
THE Edison drove an electric car?! Yeah. This one.
In every episode, I'm going to take one item and tear it apart,
bit... Ooh!
..by bit...
So, now, there's some stuff you can see.
..meet the people behind it...
Frankly, I thought many things were impossible.
..and unlock the remarkable... There is the clandestine listening device.
..and sometimes hilarious stories
behind its invention.
Hello! Look at you!
This time, it's the electric car.
The days of the internal combustion engine are clearly numbered.
Today, the future of driving is electric.
It was in reverse. Sorry, my bad.
So, how did we get from camcorders to Elon Musk's supercars?
The first electric sportscar, capable of both turning
heads and pulling Gs.
Why did 19th-century meat packing almost de-rail the electric
car revolution? Henry Ford, bringing the car to the worker.
Oh, it feels so space age!
And how should you not drive a multi-million dollar
prototype car of the future?
Oh, God! BLEEP Sorry... BLEEP I'm sorry.
I think... I think maybe you should drive.
Electric-car ownership in the UK
has increased 80-fold in the last decade.
It's maybe like a touch Del Boy, though. Just a hint of Del Boy.
To get to the bottom of the amazing past behind the electric-car
revolution, I've come to see iconic car-makers Mini.
Cars have been made at this Cowley factory for over a century.
The original Mini - made mini for fuel efficiency -
was a response to petrol rationing during the Suez oil
crisis in the 1950s.
Now, in response to the climate crisis, car-makers are ditching
petrol altogether and rapidly shifting gear to electric -
if you'll pardon the pun.
Incredibly quick! Yeah. Really quick.
This is Jack.
His job is to keep the production line moving.
Here, petrol and electric cars are made side by side.
Can you tell which ones are electric and which ones are combustion?
You'll recognise the electric Mini from the charging port.
Other than that, without opening the bonnet,
the rest of it is pretty much the same.
Mini can make up to one in three of their cars electric.
Are these cars almost finished now? They are.
Goes through various tests to make sure that the electrics are working. HORN TOOTS
Is that little toot as in, like, a celebratory toot?
That's more of an indication that it's coming off the line,
to warn others around us.
Oh, come on, Jack! Let me have my toot!
The last few years have seen electric vehicles - or EVs -
go from rare to everywhere - 0 to 60, if you like.
So what are the technological game-changers that have made this happen?
Electric cars rely on three extraordinary components,
which I'm going to unpack one by one.
And I'm going to start with the beating heart of every
electric vehicle - the motor.
These are the naked ones. These are the naked engines. The babies.
Absolutely. Electric motors have many advantages
over their combustion-engine counterparts.
I mean, they're quite a lot simpler than these ones over here.
There's probably about 90% less moveable parts in an electric
engine, as opposed to the traditional combustion.
Oh, wow! Does that mean there's less that can go wrong?
Yeah, definitely. Those moving parts can break, as they... Exactly.
An electric motor is the cleanest and simplest engine there is.
To understand why, we're going to need a quick physics lesson.
The thing about electric motors is that they are
so fantastically simple that you can make one yourself,
just using a few items from a hardware store.
On my shopping list today is a battery, copper wire,
a magnet, paperclips, scissors, sandpaper and a Curly Wurly.
Er... That one's nothing to do with the experiment.
In an extraordinary stroke of luck,
somebody appears to have left a table in the centre of this
hardware shop, exactly the right size that I need.
Now, I need to create a coil.
I mean, ideally, you'd have much shorter nails!
Looping the wire
and attaching it to a battery will turn the wire into an electromagnet.
The more loops, the stronger the magnetic field.
Now, this wire has got an enamel coating on it, which is going to
make it not so good for conducting electricity,
so I need to take that coating off.
This is insulating tape.
I've got scissors right there!
The paperclips and tape are to hold the copper coil in place.
OK. We're almost there.
Electricity, magnetism, they sort of go hand in hand.
Where you find one, you find the other.
So, although this is an electrical circuit, there'll also be
a magnetic field that's been created around this coil.
And if I now introduce a second magnetic field,
by way of magnets, one should repel the other.
And let's give it a little push.
And that's an electric motor!
With the copper coil turned into an electromagnet,
each side repels and then attracts the permanent magnet underneath,
forcing the coil to spin.
They can be a little bit more sophisticated, where you have an
alternating current, instead of just current flowing in one
direction, as we have with the battery,
but this is it. This is the principle. That's an electric motor.
I'm so...
I'm genuinely thrilled that that worked!
Look at it! That's pretty magical, isn't it?
The electric motor is ingeniously simple, but where did it come from?
Well, experimental motors
based on this principle have been around for almost 200 years.
One of the very first was invented way back in the 1830s by this
clever but quite serious-looking chap, Thomas Davenport.
He demonstrated his motor by powering a printing press
and even a miniature railway.
But they didn't take off at first, and poor Thomas died penniless.
So when did the electric motor turn up in cars?
I've come to a track in Essex to visit one of the world's
earliest examples of an electric car.
When do you imagine it might have been made? 1990s, perhaps?
1970s?
Think again.
Hi, Bernard. Good morning, Hannah. Look at this... How are you?
..magnificent beast!
Can I come on board? Please. Amazing!
This is a 1902 Columbia Electro.
Can we go for a drive? Yes, sure.
Built in the United States, it's got two electric motors, three speeds,
leather seats, but no Bluetooth connection,
and a tiller instead of a steering wheel.
It's quite a tight corner coming up. Oh, Lordy!
My driver is vintage-car collector and hat aficionado Bernard Holmes.
I notice you're not using the brake very much. No.
The brakes are not very efficient, therefore
you've got to anticipate the problems ahead.
It's not because it might damage the vehicle, somehow -
it's because they don't work! Exactly.
Sure, I feel fantastically safe!
The Columbia uses almost all of its original parts,
including its electric motors.
The car's two motors provide a mighty 3½ horsepower,
which is about the same as a push-along lawnmower.
Today, Bernard's car is a museum piece,
but 120 years ago, cars like this were all the rage.
The first commercial car with an electric motor was
invented in 1884 by Thomas Parker.
The motors were clean, they were quiet, they were reliable
and, unlike their noisy petrol counterparts,
they didn't need to be started using a hand crank.
Very quickly, they took the world by storm.
In fact, they were so popular that, by 1900,
electric motors powered around a third of all cars in the US.
Has it been roadworthy, the entire time? It has, yes.
It was first owned by Edison. What?! When it was new, yeah.
Really? Yes, and then he gave it to Henry Ford.
No way! So, THE Edison... Yes. ..drove an electric car?!
Yes, this one. This one!
Now, that's what I call a lightbulb moment.
As the inventor of said lightbulb, Thomas Edison
was obsessed with all things electric. He was good friends with
Henry Ford, and they had even worked together to develop an electric car.
Would you like to get aboard? Yeah. Am I allowed to drive it? Yes!
Am I really? Yeah. But it's very direct steering.
And don't use the brakes. Don't...
Yeah, try not to use the brakes, yes. Have you got life insurance?
Have YOU? OK, cut out. Yeah. Depress.
And a deep breath. And a deep breath!
Whoop! That's it. OK. And we're off.
All right. Ooh, gosh! It is sensitive.
Just take the brake off a bit. Thank you.
That's it. Wait, hang on, was I just...
Did I just take off with the brake on? It's quite a strange feeling, driving a car,
knowing that you can't brake! So how extraordinary, then,
that we're going back to where we were 120 years ago.
I mean, the technology has all been there for over 100 years.
Do you ever actually take it out on the road? Oh, yes.
Do you pop to the shops to get some milk? Oh, occasionally!
Do you really? Yes.
OK, so it looks like a glorified horse and cart,
but when you drive it,
it actually doesn't feel that dissimilar to a modern
electric car, and that I think is the intriguing thing about this -
that all of the ideas were there.
By the late 1800s, it looked like cars powered by electric
motors were on the road to becoming a huge success.
But as the new century dawned, the electric motor would become
totally eclipsed by its rival, the petrol engine.
To blame was Edison's old buddy and car mogul, Henry Ford,
who was obsessed with creating
America's first affordable family car.
And despite his dalliance with electric motors,
he thought the faster, cheaper petrol car that you could
fill up with ease was a much safer bet.
Inspired by Chicago's meat-packers,
who had revolutionised the meat market with one of the world's
first production lines, Ford created the car assembly line
and used it to build his iconic petrol-powered Model T.
Here's how they put them together at the Highland Park plant.
It cut the time it took to make a car from 12 hours to 90 minutes,
thus slashing the price by two-thirds.
By 1913, Ford's assembly line was turning out 1,000 cars a day.
The cheap mass-produced Model T swiftly captured the market.
Henry Ford bringing the car to the worker.
And EVs became a niche luxury product, marketed at women.
Electric motors did take off in all sorts of other areas -
everything from power tools to dishwashers.
We use billions of them every year.
But on its own, the electric motor wasn't quite enough to ignite
the electric-car revolution.
It would take big developments in our next component.
It needed juice.
This is the part that keeps our electric car running.
The portable electrical power source - also known as the battery.
I'm back on the Mini production line,
asking the important questions.
Have you ever bumped your head on one? No.
This is Leanne.
Her job is to fit a whopping great battery to each electric car.
As you bring it down, these should
line into the holes. Those bits? Yeah.
Oh, look at that!
But this is no standard AA.
This is a 200-kilo battery
made of 96 cells that use lithium-ion to generate power.
One of these bad boys could run a mobile phone for eight
years from a single charge.
How many of these do you reckon do you a day?
Oh, quite a lot. Have you ever counted? No!
I checked, and it's well over 200.
So, does the lithium-ion battery tackle people's biggest
fear about electric cars?
Whenever I tell people I drive an electric car,
the first question they always ask me is, what's the range like on it?
Cos I think that's everybody's concern about switching over.
What if you are on the motorway, your battery's about to die,
and there's nowhere to charge nearby?
I've come to the Warwick Energy Innovation Centre to see
a man about my range anxiety.
So, OK, this is, like, pretty... Oh, my gosh! Heavy.
That's even heavier than I was expecting it to be!
So you don't want that for your mobile phone... No!
This is battery boffin Professor Louis Piper.
Louis, this looks like a potted history of batteries through
the years. Precisely.
So, we have the lead acid battery, which is your first generation
of electric vehicles, that go right back to about 100 years ago.
We have a nickel-metal hydride battery here, which is...
If you remember around the late '90s, we have the revolution
of hybrid vehicles, which have both petrol and electric.
And then we have the fully electric lithium-ion battery packs
that we see here. The new ones.
When it comes to electric-car batteries,
it's all about energy density.
What gives you the most bang for your buck?
Nickel-metal hydride batteries are roughly equivalent to
a cup of petrol, and so then we move to... It's massive! It's massive.
A cup of petrol?! Exactly. Petrol's...
There's a benefit of why we burn it, yes.
So, the ideas... What's this? Like a teaspoon? Thimble, yeah.
Really? Yeah, so now we move to the lithium-ion batteries -
around 60 litres of petrol.
They reach or exceed what would be in a typical gas tank.
So you're saying, thimble of petrol, cup of petrol,
60 litres of petrol.
Yes. Roughly. I mean, that's pretty mad!
Lithium-ion batteries have taken the electric-car world by storm.
Because of this incredible energy density,
they store a huge amount of power for their size and weight.
They're like the protein bars of batteries.
But what is lithium and why does it make such a banging battery?
If there's one thing I know about lithium,
it's that it's quite reactive.
What would happen if you put one of them in the water?
Let's find out. All right, go on, then, let's do it. Let's do it.
Lithium is a soft lightweight metal, and it reacts furiously with water.
I mean, it's bubbling away quite enthusiastically.
It's this reactivity and low weight that makes it such
an energy-dense material, and great for batteries.
This is the battery, essentially,
that has reignited the electric-car movement.
This is the building block you need for fully electric.
The battery layers can be made into all sorts of shapes and sizes,
depending on the vehicle they're going into.
Louis has been experimenting with different designs.
So we have cylindrical, pouch and prismatic.
A cylindrical format works on the basis of wrapping
the layers in an Archimedean spiral...
You're making it sound fancy, there,
calling it an Archimedean spiral. You just rolled it up.
So we have essentially a Swiss roll. Thank you! We have a lasagne.
You don't impress me with your Archimedean spiral!
And we have a folded lasagne. There you go!
For the car companies, the right shape is a delicate balance
of packing in cells for maximum performance,
without compromising on safety, weight and affordability.
Tesla have a strong preference for cylindrical formats...
Whereas Mini's more on this side.
It depends on which combination they feel is the most promising to
satisfy their end product.
Whether you're a savoury or a dessert person. Yes!
Can it go further still? Yes.
We also have other lithium-ion chemistries where we know
we haven't pushed them far enough yet,
but you could push them further and we will be able to reach much
higher energy densities and performance.
Do you know what I'm enjoying most about this conversation? Yeah.
Is just how much you like batteries!
Yeah. I'm with you. I'm with you all the way!
Lithium-ion batteries are the lifeblood of every
modern electric car.
But to find out how we got them, we need to go back over 200 years
to the birth of the battery itself.
Sounds painful.
Batteries are absolutely everywhere, and they come in all shapes
and sizes, but where did they come from and how did we get them?
Well, for that, we have to thank these guys over here.
I'm going to get the big guy.
OK.
CLEARS THROAT
I'm just building myself up to it.
OK. All right. Come here, Mister.
Oof! Jesus!
I'm trying so hard...
Wriggler.
OK. Stay still. S-s-stay still!
Hello! Look at you! But we can also thank the Italian anatomist
Luigi Galvani, because in 1786, Luigi discovered that
if frogs' legs come into contact with copper and iron,
it will create an electrical circuit.
Enough, in fact, that the frogs' legs will start to twitch.
Now, the only problem, I'm afraid, is that if I'm going to
demonstrate this, the frog does need to be recently deceased. So...
I'm not really going to do it. You'll have to deal with some
archive footage instead. Oh, my God! He's escaping! I didn't mean it!
Galvani thought that twitching was caused by electricity
emanating from the frog itself.
He called his discovery animal electricity.
Now, Galvani didn't really understand the full
implications of his experiment, but it caught the eye of another
scientific colleague, Alessandro Volta.
As one of the world's leading authorities on electricity,
Volta was unconvinced the electricity was
coming from the animals themselves,
so he had a go himself.
He fiddled around with the experiment, tried it with a few
different metals, different acids,
until he didn't need the frogs' legs at all -
which means you guys are definitely safe.
Instead, Volta made a sandwich. No, not cheese and pickle.
He used copper, zinc and cardboard or cloth, soaked in saltwater.
So, zinc first, and then cardboard...
Batteries work through chemical reactions.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
When a wire is attached between zinc at the end of the sandwich
and the copper at the other end,
the saltwater reacts with the two metals,
causing electrons to move along the wire from the zinc to the copper.
This movement creates an electric current.
Let's see if this works.
Ah!
Look at that!
It's electricity! Ah!
It's like magic!
Volta had just invented the battery.
I just think this is extraordinary! I mean, this is just some...
Some junk that you'd find in your drawer
and it's giving out electricity.
It was the first time that electricity had been stored up
and released in a steady continuous flow.
But that's not quite the end of the story.
In fact, it gets a lot more gruesome.
Galvani's nephew - a physician named Aldini -
took things one step further.
In front of an audience,
he connected Volta's battery to the body of a recently deceased man.
And in front of all the onlookers,
the electricity made his limbs writhe around.
Now, Aldini wasn't trying to bring the man back to life or
anything, but legend has it he did inspire quite a well-known work
of science-fiction - specifically Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
"I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open.
"It breathed hard and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs."
For the next few decades, the scientists tinkered.
And by the late 19th century, we had the rechargeable lead acid battery.
Based on Volta's sandwich, but with a few refinements, it began to be
used in everything from train lights to generators
and the first breed of electric cars.
It has many virtues.
However cold the weather, it's always simple to start.
Here in Britain, there was
one vehicle in particular that epitomised the early
boom in electric - something that the lead acid battery made possible.
It was, of course, the humble milk float!
How's that for some nostalgia?
Do you see what I mean?
HANNAH LAUGHS
This is Wendy Davis,
the fastest milkwoman in the west...of Buckinghamshire.
And for the best part of 100 years, her family have been
delivering milk in a fleet of battery-powered floats.
The high average speed of the electric vehicle
cuts delivery costs,
especially as easy starting
and rapid acceleration can be relied on at all times.
So, if you go to this house behind you, Hannah... That one? Yes.
..with two pints of silver top, and if you're a proper milkman,
you'd put them all in one hand. Oh, OK. I'm clearly...
Clearly not a proper milkman!
Well done. Thanks. You can have a job. My first delivery.
But you need to be quicker. Oh!
Aye-aye, captain!
Wendy and her team deliver over two million pints a year
to the good people of Prestwood.
Each float powered by 48 lead acid batteries.
Well, they're easy to work on cos you can get to everything. Yeah.
So you just lift the sides up, everything's there.
This is Pete.
It's his job to make sure that these floats never run out of juice.
Oh, they're massive! Yeah, they weigh about half a tonne.
SHE GASPS So, both battery packs together,
about a tonne.
They're made from alternating plates of lead and lead oxide
immersed in sulphuric acid.
Like Volta's battery, a chemical reaction strips electrons from
the lead to produce electricity.
But unlike Volta's battery, connecting it to a power supply
puts the electrons back again,
which means the battery can be recharged.
Every night after they go out, they come back, 12-hour charge,
ready to go next day straight away.
They'll do about 40-50 miles on a full charge.
Not very good escape vehicles... No, you won't get away.
..if you were on the run. You wouldn't use it as a getaway.
No - it's interesting, I think that electric found a home
in milk floats, where it wouldn't work elsewhere.
Well, it's just because they're so basic.
There's not a lot that can go wrong with them, really.
This one could possibly do with a lick of paint. Well...
No offence. Yeah.
HE CHUCKLES
Electric floats like these proved such a success that by the 1950s,
Britain had the highest number of electric vehicles anywhere
in the world - thanks entirely to our 70,000-strong fleet
of milk floats.
Electric had found its niche.
It was absolutely perfect for this very, very particular purpose.
It found its home - but across everywhere else,
petrol was still really dominating.
Cheers.
Ahh, that's...
It's quite... I think this is one that's been left out in the sun.
Electric floats flourished.
Day in, day out, it's always a pleasure to drive.
But electric cars just couldn't seem to get off the ground,
despite many attempts.
The first view of a new generation of car
designed for towns and cities.
Some people see in this machine an electric answer
to our traffic problem.
The makers have an eye on the woman driver.
She'll find the car easy to handle and to park.
Mm, careful.
The reason none of these battery-powered beauties ever
took off goes back to a problem at the heart of
the lead-acid battery - range.
Let's go back to Louis.
So, we have the lead-acid battery.
So, this is like a teaspoon? Thimble, yeah. Really? Yes.
And that's not going to get you very far.
This brand-new electrically-powered vehicle is called,
quite simply, The White Car.
It's powered by a specially quick, chargeable 48-volt electric battery,
which gives it a maximum driving time of between 40-65 minutes.
Unable to compete with petrol on range,
it looked like the electric car was dead.
Full marks for style, though.
Luckily, a battery breakthrough was coming.
OK, so I know we've been talking about batteries for quite a while -
but just stay with me, because this is one of my favourite bits.
That new battery - it didn't come from the car industry.
It came from the personal electronics revolution of the 1990s.
This is a telephone, a fax machine, and a photocopier.
I can't believe that technology is so small.
Put these two together, and you get this -
a travelling video.
If you remember the '80s and '90s, then you will know that it was
a pretty wild time for portable devices,
because all sorts of companies were completely obsessed
with miniaturisation,
making things as small and portable as possible.
The only problem was that if you wanted something that lasted for
any reasonable amount of time,
it would look something like this.
I mean, this phone is about 80% battery.
So, camcorders of around that era had batteries that would only last
about half an hour or an hour before they would cut out -
which is not ideal, if you want to capture life's
most important moments.
The public appetite for electronics that could be both small
and long-lasting drove an intense period of battery R&D.
And this was when scientists turned
to the volatile metal called lithium.
The idea of a lithium battery had been around for a really long time,
since the 1950s.
But as a material, lithium has that habit of exploding,
which doesn't make it ideal to put in products that you're
going to sell to the public.
That changed in the mid-1980s.
A Japanese chemist called Akira Yoshino found a way
to stop lithium self-destructing by introducing a special
carbon-based material.
It held the volatile lithium ions in place,
stopping them from running amok and making a battery
far less likely to go "bang".
In 1991, the first lithium-ion battery was released into the wild
in the form of this right here.
A little bit of history.
This is the Sony CCD-TR1...
..and it's a camcorder from 1991.
Hi!
This is just all that people did, was turn around to people's faces
and zoom in and out on them.
Simpler times.
And thus, a revolution in the lithium-ion battery was born.
With the new batteries, camcorders could now last for several hours
before needing a recharge.
The lithium-ion battery quickly found its way into everything
that needed to be picked up and unplugged,
reducing its size, or massively extending its life.
After three decades of development,
the average lithium-ion battery in your laptop can safely store
as much energy as a hand grenade.
Emphasis on the word "safely".
While millions of us were exploring the joys of home movies,
over in the US, these new batteries had caught the attention of
a couple of electric car innovators.
It was the late '90s, and electric cars with their
giant batteries and limited range still hadn't broken through.
They were big, heavy, expensive.
Everybody's experience was that electric cars
were just slow and stupid.
Engineers Tom Gage and Alan Coconi wanted to change that.
Here it is.
Oh, my God, I can't believe it.
HE LAUGHS
It's been two decades since Tom last saw this prototype.
It's their hand-built, fully-electric sports car.
It looks like it did the last time I saw it.
It's just a beautiful shape.
The T-Zero.
Oh, man. Bringing back memories.
Tom and Alan thought that the new lightweight lithium-ion batteries
would be perfect for an electric sports car.
Alan was a remote-control airplane enthusiast all his life,
and he'd observed that they were starting to use
lithium-ion batteries.
And he said, "Well, what's to keep us from using thousands
"of them to power a car"?
The only problem was a lithium-ion battery that was big enough
for a car didn't exist.
And so, they tried using a lot of the camcorder batteries -
and I mean, a lot.
We did the math about the size and the weight, and said,
"Well, we can fit about 6,800 of these in,
"if we package them correctly".
Wiring together 6,800 lithium-ion batteries was a painstaking job.
It was a huge undertaking to figure out how to connect
all these cells correctly without making them go up
in smoke and flame.
And then finally came the day of the first test drive.
Guy pulls up to me at a stoplight in a motorcycle,
and I just couldn't resist.
So, as soon as the light changed, I floored it.
The car just took off like crazy.
It was just unbelievable.
He was caught off guard, and he went flying by me with
a wheelie up in the air, and trying to recover his pride.
But I had won, clearly.
The performance of the T-Zero was unprecedented.
The T-Zero is the first electric sports car,
capable of both turning heads and pulling Gs.
There's some video of us beating a Lamborghini.
And a Ferrari. And a Porsche. And a Corvette.
And those nifty new batteries meant it could drive for 300 miles
before needing a charge.
It was a revelation to everyone who drove the car.
This thing just opened so many people's eyes into
what an EV could be.
Tom and Alan planned to put the car into production.
We had a whole crew of craftsmen and engineers
putting the things together and I realised,
"Well, yeah, we can charge a lot of money for it,
"but can't charge enough to make actual profits."
I think slowly it dawned on us that maybe this wasn't going
to be a production car.
With a build cost of around a quarter of a million dollars,
in the end, only one of these cars was made.
But that's not the end of this story.
Tom's next dream was to build an affordable electric car,
the eBox.
But he needed money.
And so, he turned to a young investor with deep pockets.
Yes, none other than Elon Musk.
I told him about the T-Zero, and I think I gave him a test ride
that very first meeting.
He was pretty impressed.
I could tell he was less impressed with the eBox idea.
We had a lot of back and forth with Elon, but eventually,
he said "no" on the box, but he's interested in the T-Zero.
And I said, "Well, the T-Zero is not for sale".
Tom was no longer interested in commercialising his sports car,
so he introduced Elon to someone who was -
Martin Eberhard, founder of a fledgling car company
called Tesla.
I don't know what all happened between Martin and Elon,
but that's pretty much how they came together.
So, you introduced Elon Musk to Tesla? Yes.
And this is one of the highlights of my career,
building this car.
Looks great.
Gotta get it running again.
HE CHUCKLES
Musk invested over $6 million into Tesla,
licensed the T-Zero's lithium-ion technology,
and brought out the Tesla Roadster.
14 years after test-driving the T-Zero,
Musk released the mass-market Model 3 -
now the best-selling electric car of all time -
helping him to become the world's richest man.
It's kind of unbelievable to me that when I think of where we were
20 years ago, that now there could be a company like Tesla
that sold three million EVs,
and every other car company in the world is chasing after them.
And that's it.
The epic story of how the lithium-ion car battery was born.
I'm back at Mini,
helping battery-fitter James.
Well, not so much helping
as watching.
So, is this all automatic now?
Yes. You wouldn't want to have that fall on you.
Thank goodness for robots.
But I can't help thinking that these batteries have changed
the landscape so fast,
that car manufacturers are still catching up.
One thing I'm noticing is that the batteries,
they're, like, a T-shape.
That's because we've designed the battery to fit
into the existing models.
Underneath, you'll see a fuel tank and a transmission tunnel.
And that's where we've designed this battery to go into.
So, it's the same little hole in the chassis? Yes.
And you just pop the battery in there? Yep.
I think when you're here, you get this real sense of just how quickly
this move towards electric vehicles has been.
And, you know, you kind of get the idea that it's caught them
a bit by surprise.
They haven't been building these electric cars from the ground up
over the last decade or so.
They're retrofitting an existing combustion-engine vehicle
to cater for this new demand.
And, in fact, it's telling that many have recently announced
that they are moving their electric car production to China.
So, this was a last chance to see EVs coming off the line...
..at this iconic factory.
Producing these batteries is a truly global effort.
Raw materials are dug from all corners of the Earth.
Lithium, from Australia.
Cobalt, from West Africa.
Nickel, from Indonesia.
And graphite, from China.
Now clearly, there is an environmental cost from all of
the mining needed to produce these batteries -
which brings me to an important question,
are electric vehicles really the environmentally-friendlier car
that they're often held up as?
Well, you'll be unsurprised to know that the answer is complicated.
It depends on lots of factors -
the source of the electricity and how far you drive, for instance.
Electric cars are certainly clean and quiet.
But the bottom line is, yes,
they are greener than combustion engines.
Because, although it takes more carbon emissions to build
an electric car than a combustion one -
largely down to that massive battery -
in Europe, over the lifetime an electric vehicle is driven,
the total emissions are just a third that of a combustion engine car.
And as our electricity gets greener,
those emissions will get even lower.
Scientists are also working on reducing the environmental impact
of batteries by making them less reliant on rare materials.
It's, sort of, like a slow motion roller-coaster for these cars.
It is.
Time for another celebratory toot.
HORN TOOTS
The elegant motor and supercharged batteries have driven
the electric revolution.
But when you bring in our next component,
you get the rush of instant acceleration.
It is the electric car's equivalent of a gearbox.
This is the transmission.
Launch controls activated, right foot, fully down.
And then, I just lift the brake? Yep.
Oh, my God!
A new breed of high-performance car is taking full advantage of
the EV transmission's lack of gears and instant acceleration.
Too much! Oh, my gosh.
This is so much fun.
The power just is continuous.
It doesn't have any delay at all.
This is the fully-electric Porsche Taycan Turbo S...
..and this is racing champion
Esmee Hawkey.
I think it's her turn to take the wheel.
And we're off!
SHE LAUGHS
I cannot believe this is your job.
This car is fast.
122!
You are wild!
Wow! Incredible acceleration.
Is it faster for you? Like, do you notice that it's quicker?
Yeah, it's just so much more responsive, and it's just...
..the speed is phenomenal.
Your head hits the back of the headrest. I know!
And you're like, "Jesus"! Oh, I noticed!
Honestly, Esmee, women drivers.
What are they like?
They're extremely fast, that's what they're like.
So, why does the transmission in an electric car mean
such fast acceleration?
Let's ask engineer and Billy Idol lookalike Patrick Sheen.
You're here to help us solve the mystery... Yes.
..of why electric cars are so much faster accelerating. Exactly, yeah.
So, most electric cars have a single-speed gearbox.
There's no, sort of, sequential gearbox system.
OK, for the automotively challenged among you,
the gearbox - or transmission -
that's the thing that transmits the power from the engine to the wheels.
In an electric car, it's basically a giant wheel with a smaller cog
that turns it - sort of like a bike with just one gear.
Look, here it is on our Mini.
It's that circular bit on the side of the motor.
Sorry, Patrick, you were saying?
Most electric cars have a single-speed gearbox.
There's no clutch, there's no valves, and all this, kind of,
extra infrastructure that comes from the combustion engine.
So, it's a lot simpler.
So, between power being generated and the wheels moving, I mean,
you just basically put your foot down, and that's it?
Gone. It's right there.
Launch controls activated.
And we're off!
Electric cars reach full power almost instantly...
120, Jesus!
..because of what's not happening when your foot hits the floor.
Whereas in a combustion engine...
You've got to put your foot down on the clutch,
pop it into gear, come off the clutch.
The reason why all combustion-engine cars -
even automatics - need a whole fleet of gears,
but electric cars don't,
goes back to the simplicity of the electric motor.
The main, sort of, key difference mechanically -
an electric motor wants to spin.
It's intrinsic that it rotates.
So, the electromagnets generate an opposing force against each other,
and that causes a rotation.
Ah, yes, I think I've seen that somewhere, Patrick.
In a combustion engine, what we're having to do is, first of all,
we're putting air into it - so we put the air in, the fuel in,
we then squash that all together.
It goes bang, and then, we have to push a piston down and convert
linear motion into a rotational force.
Up and down, into turning? Exactly.
It sounds inefficient, doesn't it?
Yeah. The fact that there's noise at all means that some energy
is being wasted in sound. Precisely.
The electric motor's simpler mechanism means that it can revolve
incredibly fast, almost instantly.
So, no need for gears.
The revolution range, or the speed range of these electric motors
can go all the way up to about 20,000 revolutions per minute.
So, it's very, very high speed.
And let's give it a little push.
20,000 revolutions per minute.
Don't think mine got up to that.
And internal combustion engine generally can't go anything
past around 7-8,000 rpm.
So, as soon as you get to that limit, you need another gear
in order to change, whereas the electric cars can just keep going
and going, and going and going.
The simple motor and single-speed transmission create instant power.
But the incredible acceleration of the electric car transmission
has been known about for over 100 years.
In fact, the very first Porsche was electric -
the P1, designed by Ferdinand Porsche in 1898.
In the first motor races, electric cars held their own,
often beating petrol cars to the podium.
One of the most legendary was La Jamais Contente -
"The Never Content".
It was raced in 1899 by Belgian driver Camille Jenatzy.
It beat the land speed record,
becoming the first car to exceed 60mph.
And, over the EV resurgence of the last decade...
..modern electric cars have been rapidly improving in their
0-to-60 performances.
So much so that every year since 2020,
electric cars have held the crown
as the fastest-accelerating road cars in the world.
So, let's put this to the test.
I've got a racetrack, I've got some fast cars.
Time to pit the acceleratory power of the electric car transmission
against the multiple gears of a petrol car.
This over here is Porsche's iconic 911.
It's got a combustion engine inside that puts out 480 horsepower,
and it weighs 1,600 kilograms -
which is 700 kilos lighter than the electric equivalent.
Those batteries are pretty heavy.
Let's see which one's fastest off the start line.
OK, you ready?
You ready?
Oh-ho-ho!
OK, so for the launch,
you can see the electric transmission just really kicking in,
and it accelerates away from the 911,
just digs in much quicker.
And it's streets ahead.
That 911 does 0-60 in 3.3 seconds -
compared to the electric Taycan,
which does it in 2.8.
That might not sound like much of a difference,
what's half a second between friends?
But that is enough to put the electric Taycan among
the fastest-accelerating cars in the world.
It seems pretty clear that the age of the electric car is here.
But in terms of the infrastructure,
there is still a long way to go.
If we're all going electric,
then surely we need millions more charging points.
Or do we?
What if you didn't need to plug in your car at all?
What if you could power it with electricity that was guaranteed
to be zero-carbon and completely free?
Sounds too good to be true - but it might not be,
because the future is looking sunny.
I'm in the Netherlands to meet a man behind a car company
called Lightyear.
And no, his name isn't Buzz.
Hi, Tom. Hey, Hannah.
How're you doing? Look at this!
Great to meet you. Lovely to meet you.
Welcome to Lightyear. Oh, my goodness me.
This looks very futuristic.
This is the Lightyear 0.
And, yes, those are solar panels on the roof and bonnet.
But this isn't a sneak peek at James Bond's new ride.
This is the world's first solar-powered production car,
meaning very soon, you'll be able to go out and buy one.
What was the big idea, what was your big motivation behind this?
The biggest motivation? Our planet.
This is head of development, Tom Selten.
Electric vehicles are great, don't get me wrong.
But charging infrastructure, you need still a lot
of electricity to power those cars.
So, what we think is that it's best actually to make the car
as energy-efficient as possible.
And that is it generates electricity itself.
Some people, I think, when they think of solar panels,
they would imagine the really ugly things that get stuck on
the top of the house. Flat panels, yeah.
How hard was it to not do that?
It was initially a problem because if you curve a solar panel,
then every, sort of, point is pointed different towards the sky,
right, and by definition, if it's differently pointed,
it generates a different amount of electricity.
So, we also develop the electronics to actually cope with that.
So, weren't you not just tempted to just do a flat bonnet,
and a flat roof? Yeah, but it's all about aerodynamics, right?
So, if you look at the vehicle, you really see two teardrops.
So, a teardrop is a really aerodynamic shape.
I've noticed there's a few things missing.
One of these is the rear-view cameras,
which we placed on the side.
Also really obvious here is the wheel spat.
If you see this wheel cover here, it actually gets you
10km range extra. Oh, really?! Yeah.
Oh, my goodness! So, why not do it, right?
We are the world's most efficient production car to date.
It's crazy, it feels like the car propels itself, because it has
so much - so less drag, actually.
When you say "when I'm driving" - does that mean I get to drive it?
I think so, that's the invitation.
Yeah, let's definitely do that.
SHE WHISPERS: I'm going in.
Ooh!
Oh, it feels so space-age.
What's your first impression? It's very...different.
Different? It is different.
Your first drive in a solar car. I know.
Off you go.
Here we go.
Smooth, huh? Yeah, very smooth.
Watch out for bicycles here.
We're still in the Netherlands. Yeah.
Today, we've been lucky with the weather -
but obviously, you can't always rely on sunshine.
So helpfully, there is a backup charging port.
When it's sunny like this, how often do you need to charge it?
Yeah, it depends on the amount you drive,
but you can charge up to 40-70km a day. Oh, wow!
So if you're using this for your commute, then,
you just never have to plug it in? If you commute just 40km a day,
you basically don't need to charge the whole summertime.
If you live in Spain, this car can generate up to 11,
maybe even 12,000km a year.
And if you drive just 10,000km a year, then yeah,
you don't need to... Oh, my goodness.
Don't need to charge.
But then, that's, like, completely free.
What's the speed limit, by the way?
I think it's 50 here?
Oh, good, I was doing 70.
THEY LAUGH
Oh, I'm on the wrong side of the road!
At this point, Tom was starting to get a little bit nervous
about my driving - and probably with good reason.
I genuinely cannot tell how wide this car is.
Before you see what happens next,
I think I need to stress that driving a prototype car
without wing mirrors is as hard as I'm about to make it look.
We need to build our technology, ooh, from scratch.
BLEEP! Oh, God, sorry!
I'm BLEEP sorry, I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. Oh, my God. I'm sorry.
We need to... Oh, my God, I'm sorry.
Let's see what happened.
I crashed their car.
He's angry, our engineer.
Huh? Are you angry?
Are you cross with me?
Is it bad?
Is it bad? The front? Yeah.
Erm, well...
SHE GASPS
..it's crashed a little bit.
Where? Oh, my gosh.
She should be fine.
Oh! It's a tiny little scratch!
That's actually quite bad, I'm sorry.
I'm really sorry, I'm sorry.
Ah, I need to give him a huge present, then.
Well, there goes my no-claims bonus.
OK, so basically, the car's quite wide, and it was really hot
cos we weren't allowed to have the aircon on because of "sound".
And I'm on the wrong side of the road, and I clipped a kerb, so...
I'm sorry.
I think...I think maybe you should drive?
Tom very kindly agreed not to sue,
and also to drive me back to the factory so we could take a look
at the new cars being built.
Even if it was a bit of an awkward journey.
"Please observe - engineers in their natural habitat.
"Do not tap on the glass, they are easily frightened.
"Do not feed them pizza, they may follow you home."
THEY LAUGH
In terms of price, though, how much is this car?
As this car is really exclusive, it's 250,000 euros.
It's super expensive because we only built 200.
But if we scale this up, then there is, sort of,
an exponential decrease in pricing,
because you're not only going to build one car, but you're going
to build 100,000 cars.
Lightyear are following the same business model as Tesla -
build and sell an expensive luxury car, and then, use the revenue
to develop a cheaper mass-market version.
When's your second car going to be out?
2025. That's what we aim for now.
OK. It's not far away. It's not far away.
No, we are full speed.
Lightyear's ultimate ambition is to build a car that
you never need to plug in.
Let's face it, the greenest way to travel is never going to be
solo journeys by car.
But we do live in a world that's built for cars,
so an affordable, solar-powered one is an intriguing prospect.
Electric cars have been around far longer than I realised.
Over 120 years.
THE Edison drove an electric car?
Yeah, this one.
But it's only now, thanks to decades of innovation,
that they are finally coming of age.
And not before time.
We've had the dominance of petrol-powered cars for,
what, over 100 years now?
There's nowhere for them to go.
There's no real way that they can be substantially improved.
And yet, we're now at the stage where these lithium-battery cars
are as good as the petrol alternatives.
And yet, there's all this headroom, there's all of these ways
that they can end up improving.
And that, to me, says that in the future,
electric cars aren't just going to be the more
environmentally-friendly option.
They're also just going to be better.
Next time, it's the fitness tracker.
I'll find out how 1970s car crashes
help us to count every step.
That would really hurt a lot.
Why World War II dogfights
let us track our oxygen levels.
I mean, I know what you're thinking.
Tom Cruise, right?
Rick Dabate now guilty on all three counts.
And how our fitness trackers are even catching killers.
They plan to use Connie's Fitbit as evidence.
To explore the interesting dilemmas behind some
familiar pieces of technology,
and hear some of my own thoughts, go to...
..and follow the links to the Open University.