I’ve completed the main bulk of posts from my trip to Gothenburg last week, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have more stuff to endlessly witter on about. And this is a prototype electric car from Volvo that they produced in 1976 which I thought was quite exciting. Well, relatively exciting, I don’t drive and so there’s a limit to my enthusiasm here.
Inside the car. Volvo produced this car at a time of concern about energy and emissions, although it was too clunky to enter mainstream production. They created two prototypes, one was a four-seat commuter version and the other was a two-seat utility version intended for short-distance work such as deliveries.
The car was a little limited in many ways, it took ten hours to charge the heavy batteries and then it would only go around fifty kilometres. Some of the money invested into the project was from the Swedish telecommunications company, Televerket, who hoped that they could use the vehicles to deliver city mail without generating emissions. Very forward thinking, although this is less “freedom of the open road” and more “a carefully planned errand”, but there we go, technology has to start somewhere.
A lot of great things important for the future happened in 1976.