The cars still run. By 1899, he had developed several different types of motorised vehicles.”Its so much a part of R. After their deaths, the descendants started getting inquiries from car collectors to purchase it. Thats the year the Olds Motor Vehicle Co.Around that time, he was experimenting with electric cars and offered them for sale, though its unclear if any were ever sold. The Baby Olds is a miniature copy of the Mama. Though they were considered reliable, they were also very expensive. His goal was to make cars for what became the middle class,” she said.Olds built his first vehicle in 1887, a three-wheel steam-powered car with a gas boiler.E.Debbie Stephens said shes pleased that the car is staying. Olds and the history of this museum it couldnt go anywhere but here,” Bill Adcock, executive director of the museum, told the Lansing State Journal. Theyve been on display at the museum since 2008 after the couple purchased them in an auction.”It wouldnt matter if I paid a dollar or USD 100,000. and Olds Gasoline Engine Works were combined to form Olds Motor Works.But even if Olds continued to produce electric vehicles, he likely would have “hit the same wall” as other electric car manufacturers, said Peter Crisitello, a New Jersey auto history buff and expert on electric cars.With electric vehicles in the rear-view mirror and all but forgotten, the rare 1899 Olds electric was uncovered in a Lansing garage in 1959. Manufacturing was moved to Detroit.”We felt it was important to keep these in front of the public because the automotive history is disappearing.Fords claim to fame was the mechanised assembly line, but it was Stephens ancestor Ransom Eli Olds who came up with the idea for mass production.
Though she left Lansing after college, her sister, Diana Tarpoff, and a cousin, Clela Gray, still live in the area.The 119-year-old four-seater has been on loan to the R. Olds Transportation Museum, but it was in danger of going into the hands of a private collector.They spent three years raising money — they wont say how much — to buy the only known surviving 1899 Olds electric car.More than a half-century later, Stephens, who is now 66 and lives in Dublin, Ohio, is still fighting to preserve her great-grandfathers legacy, which is deeply rooted in Lansing.After the fire, Olds moved back to Lansing and dropped the electric vehicles to concentrate on the gas-powered Curved Dash, Debbie Stephens said. Workers in his factory would roll chassis on carts to allow parts to be added to them.While electric cars seem like a recent development, early auto pioneers experimented with them.”My great-grandfather did that before he did,” Stephens recalls saying. Its priceless. Olds Transportation Museum.The three-year fundraising effort was led by Lansing attorney Jim Neal, a volunteer at the museum.
The brothers have since died. In 1996, they loaned it to the R. Two brothers, Don and Ken McDowell, purchased the car and stored it for years.Debbie Stephens, her husband Peter Stephens, and a group of more than a dozen auto historians, companies and electric worker unions have scored a major victory in their efforts to keep that history alive in Lansing. And thats something Peter and I and many others are concerned about, especially here in Lansing,” she said.Stephens and her husband also own a one-of-a-kind, crowd-pleaser pair of cars called a “Mama” and “Baby” Olds, built in 1906.(Source).Stephens and others feared that the car might be sold to a collector in Europe or Asia, never to be seen in Lansing again.E.It cements Olds legacy as the only auto pioneer who experimented with four types of power on early cars: steam, gas, electric and diesel. Olds electric was priced at USD 1,600, which is USD 48,000 in todays prices.Debbie Stephens remembers raising her hand in her East Lansing Junior High School class to correct a teacher who told small corner bathtub the students that Henry Ford invented the auto assembly line. The surviving electric Olds was likely off-site at the time of the fire. Advancements in internal combustion engines made them the favoured type of car, and gasoline power became the accepted technology over electric and steam for the rest of the 20th century. Other companies sold 8,000 electric cars by 1900, according to a history supplied by the museum.A disastrous 1901 factory fire is believed have destroyed 15 Olds electric cars.E.Neal and Adcock arent spilling how much they paid. Its one of a kind,” Adcock said.”The gasoline cars were cheaper to produce.
MAVAW (ZHEJIANG) SMART