E-mobility 65 years ago

The e-mobile 'Tama'

Already sixty-five years ago Nissan had experience with electrically driven automobiles. Today’s Leaf is the product of a ‘green’ conscience but in 1947 the Tama was proof that necessity is indeed the mother of invention. (Thomas Mendle, Jessica Fischer , 24.12.2012)

The ancestor of the Nissan Leaf

Very soon the electrically powered Leaf built by the Japanese car maker Nissan will reach the German market. The only e-mobile in the manufacturer’s portfolio? Well, yes. Their first? By no means! The first was the 'Tama', the very distant ancestor of the Leaf. The Tama was a full-scale four-seater van and there was even a pick-up version made.

Post-war necessity

The year 1945. After the Second World War Japan is in ruins. Oil is extremely scarce and so little petrol is refined, and yet there is an urgent need for automotive transport. This moved the Japanese government to encourage the development of electrically powered vehicles. One of the outcomes of this policy was the Tama, built in 1947 by the Tokyo Electric Cars Company, the forerunner of the Prince Motor Co. Ltd. which later was taken over by Nissan. The auto had a 36 volt motor producing 4.5 horsepower (3.3 kW). This enabled to post-war e-mobile to whizz about at up to 35 kilometres an hour. But in those days the tempo in the Land of the Rising Sun was in general much more leisurely than it is today.

Electro-taxi

The tiny auto was just 3.03 metres long and it may well come as a surprise to learn that it was most often used as a taxi. The seat-backs in front could be folded forward to allow passengers to access the back of the Tama. The car’s range was also suited for use as a taxi. On paper the battery charge was good for 65 kilometres but in efficiency tests the little e-mobile was proven to have an autonomy of 96.3 kilometres. This would not be a bad result even for today’s electrically driven models. The batteries were positioned left and right under the forward-opening doors and could easily be removed. The compartments were even fitted with rollers so that it was possible to exchange empty batteries for new fully charged ones in very little time. When the import of oil to Japan stabilized, the car makers lost interest in electrically driven cars and concentrated on internal combustion power. However the look of the little Tama has not been completely forgotten… in 1998, after all, Nissan brought out a compact mini-van which they dubbed the Cube.

An early record

The example of the Tama shows that things which were basically well founded can have a come-back. But anyone who might think that sixty-five years is a long time… that e-mobility had its origins after the Second World War… is deluded. The first electrically powered vehicle was driven by the electrical engineer Gustave Trouvé in in 1881. That was five years before the ‘official’ invention of the automobile credited to Carl Benz in 1886. As early as 1897 there was a fleet of electrically driven taxis in New York City and on the 29th of April 1899 an electrically powered auto was the first land vehicle to top the magical 100 mark with a record 105.882 kilometres an hour.