Powering back to the FUTURE

Rotaries, gas turbines, hybrids-even nukes! Propulsion tech from the past, present, and beyond the horizon is revealed at the SAE Mobility History display at WCX'19.

Credit Leonardo DaVinci for creating what many historians believe was the first depiction of a self-powered vehicle. It was powered by springs. And in the centuries since then, engineers have found increasingly complex and interesting solutions for vehicle propulsion.

Steam came first. Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot's 1769 steam tractor is generally believed to be the first self-propelled road vehicle. By the 1830s, steam carriages carried passengers on roadways in Britain. During this period another technology was emerging: in the 1830s, American blacksmith Thomas Davenport's experiments with electricity and electromagnetism led him to patent an electric motor. When battery technology finally caught up with this vision in the 1880s, the recipe for the first electric cars was born.