When German automaker Porsche was preparing to release its first electric vehicle (EV) in 2019, executives met with a roomful of historians to test a slogan idea: "The world's first electric Porsche."
From the end of the long table, there came a chuckling noise.
Heads turned to stare.
"That won't work," said Guido Eickholz, the director of the archive of the German auto-parts manufacturer, Reutter.
"It's not the first electric Porsche. There's been one done years ago and it's sitting in a factory in Melbourne."
How this car came to be the world's first electric Porsche — and end up in Melbourne — is a story about tinkering, racing, restoration, obsession, and the mostly forgotten history of early EVs.
Long before today's sleek designs there were dozens of prototypes, some familiar-looking, others truly bizarre.
It's also a story about what could have been: a glimpse of an alternate history in which something like today's EVs arrived years earlier.
From top-seller to sideshow curiosity
At the turn of the 20th century, when the Eiffel Tower was a modern eyesore, an exciting new technology appeared: EVs.
"Electric carriages" had similar selling points to today's EVs: quiet, cheap to run, and suited to nipping about the city.
"Electric vehicles were popular at the end of the 19th century," said Tim Minchin, a professor of history at La Trobe University.
"They were outselling internal combustion engines."
But the internal combustion engine improved, petrol flowed, and the 20th century vanished in a cloud of exhaust smoke.
Fast-forward to 1953, when a blue Porsche 356 rolled off the production line in Stuttgart, Germany.
At the time, number 50058 was no different to the other petrol-engine 356s.
A sportier version of the Volkswagen Beetle, the 356 was a great success. Number 50058 was shipped off to America.
There, in the late '50s, the Porsche was converted to electric-drive.
Our knowledge of why and how his happened, and who did it, would have been lost but for the detective work of a Porsche 356 aficionado.
Now based in Canberra, Andreas Luzzi first heard of the car in 1980s California.
Back then, it was known only by rumour as the "electric Porsche".
Tracking down the car's owner
Andreas set about confirming the rumour.
Having grown up in Switzerland in the 1970s, steeped in ideas of sustainability and conservation, Andreas was fascinated by the idea of an electric Porsche.
Slowly, he pieced together more clues.
"Through the [vintage Porsche] circles it was known that General Electric had developed a complete electric drive train for one of these early vehicles."
Next, he learnt the name of the General Electric employee that had supervised the conversion: Hal Olson.
By this point, 20 years had passed since Andreas first heard of the car. It was now the early noughties.
Andreas tracked Hal down. He was nearing 80 and retired, but happy to talk.
He no longer had the car, but he knew where to find it.
The 'Quiet Porsche' project
Over a series of long-distance phone calls and emails with Andreas, Hal told the story of converting the car.
In the late 1950s, as the manager of a special design facility at GE, Hal was tasked with developing electric drives for postal delivery vans to be used around the country.
At the time, electric cars were back in vogue. The Henney Kilowatt, capable of travelling an hour on a single charge, was released in 1959. Quiet-running battery-powered trucks were being used for early-morning milk deliveries. And Japan had an electric taxi service.
"The conversion wasn't a hobby — it was a General Electric contract," Andreas said.
"Hal was charged to find a way to develop electric drives for the postal delivery vans that the US postal system wanted to implement in those years."
He needed a simple, lightweight, aerodynamic car, and the Porsche 356 fit the bill.
So he bought one second-hand, number 50058, and nicknamed the project QP — short for "Quiet Porsche".
He stripped out the engine and fuel system and installed a small DC motor along with lead-acid batteries in the front and back.
The car had a top speed of about 90 kilometres per hour, Hal told Andreas.
Running costs were low: a mile of travel consumed less than one cent's worth of electricity.
But then, disappointment: the postal service withdrew from the project.
"They gave him a no-go and decided against doing electric drives," Andreas said.
"Hal was a bit frustrated, he told me, but also inspired."
For the next 15 years, until 1975, Hal drove the electric Porsche himself.
"It would be out every day, every weather in Pennsylvania."
The average EVs of the '70s and '80s
After Hal stopped driving the car, it sat in storage. Meanwhile, the fortunes of EVs waxed and waned.
In 1973, an embargo by oil-producing countries triggered an energy crisis. The oil price spiked, and inflation soared. Long queues of vehicles formed at service stations that had run dry. Petrol was rationed.
As petrol prices rose, so did interest in EVs.
US lawmakers passed legislation to develop electric and hybrid vehicles, while car makers hurriedly rolled out EV options. Some were conversions of petrol-engine models. Others were glorified golf carts. The 1974 CitiCar had a top speed of 40kph and a range of 65 kilometres. The 1977 Chevrolet Electrovette could go 80km when cruising at 50kph.
But, as these figures suggest, EVs were still being held back by under-powered batteries.
This was evident in 1996, when the US car-maker GM rolled out the product of years of work: the first purpose-built EV of the modern era.
For reasons that are still hotly debated, the EV — called the Impact (or EV-1) — wasn't the success that had been anticipated.
A peek under the bonnet gave one reason: it had lead-acid batteries — the type Hal Olson had used in the 1950s (later models upgraded to nickel metal hydride, with double the range).
It would take a new kind of battery for EVs to rival the range of internal combustion engine vehicles.
Fortunately, this breakthrough had already happened.
How mobile phones led to today's cars
These new batteries were already in consumer electronics.
Patented in 1976, and greatly improved in the 1980s, lithium batteries were powering everything from camcorders to mobile phones in the early 1990s.
GM's EV ambition foundered, but soon an unknown company would release the first all-electric production car to use the lithium-ion battery cell.
That car was the 2008 Tesla Roadster.
The need to find a better battery for consumer electronics drove the discoveries that led to lithium-ion batteries and today's EVs, said John Fletcher, a professor of electrical engineering at UNSW.
"Mobile devices coming of age was the prime mover for the improvement in battery technologies," he said.
"To a large extent the EV market has benefited from [mobile devices] rather than it being in the other direction."
So, could the leap to lithium-ion have come sooner?
Here, Professors Minchin and Fletcher have differing opinions.
There was nothing inevitable about the triumph of the internal combustion engine, Professor Minchin said. It benefited from huge investment.
Plus, there was cost of developing — from scratch — a vast network of stations to fuel and service these new oil-guzzling machines.
"There was massive investment in the internal combustion engine. The car industry really pioneered mass production," he said.
If more money had been spent on developing EVs, he said, a better battery would have come sooner.
But Professor Fletcher argued that development of lithium-ion batteries required advances in associated fields, such as materials science.
"We first had to learn something about lithium," he said.
"It's not just money-related — the more money we pump into it doesn't necessarily make it go faster."
'It's not for sale'
In 2003, with Hal's help, Andreas found the car.
It was owned by a 356 dealer who was willing to sell, and Andreas had it brought to Australia.
The electric Porsche arrived in decent shape, but was not roadworthy. The chassis was rusted, the lead-acid batteries had been drained, and a windshield sticker showed it hadn't been registered for three decades.
Andreas kept it in storage until about five years ago when he sold it to Greg Newton, a specialist vintage car restorer in Melbourne.
Greg's workshop was the "factory in Melbourne" that Guido Eickholz had referred to in the 2019 meeting with Porsche executives.
Soon after that meeting, Porsche got in touch with Greg.
"The first thing they asked about was buying it," Greg recalled.
They offered $50,000, he said.
"I said, 'It's not for sale, I don't want to sell it.'"
Over the next three months, Greg said, the offer price increased to $370,000.
"I just said, 'No, I'm not interested. I want to finish it.'"
Greg estimates the car will be ready within about 18 months, although restoring a one-off prototype is tricky.
He plans to install modern lithium-ion batteries within the old lead-acid battery boxes, and keep the original electrical components.
"The car should still look as it looked in those original old photos," he said.
"If that means that I'll have a modern battery sitting inside something that looks like an old battery, I'll probably try and get away with that.
"I can't wait to drive it around."
