Themselves early adopters of the electric vehicle, the Japanese also recognized that the eV was soon to sweep the United States. At the start of the twentieth century, more than one third of the cars on American roads were electric, and the need for a national network of battery swap stations seemed self-evident.

But as they vied for market dominance, each of the original Big Three automakers (Studebaker, the Anderson Electric Car Company, and Baker Electric) pursued their own technical standard for car batteries. Each of their form factors was unique, and proprietary, and none of them interoperable. It would fall to the great industrialist Tetsurō Tachibana to solve the problem, by uncoupling the power cell from its adapter, and making the components available individually through one of his nation’s most beloved obsessions, the vending machine.

Tachibana witnessed the explosive growth of the American road in the 1920s — ten thousand miles of new roads, built with $189 million of federal money — and knew that this larger network would invite longer drives, and more electricity. But rural electrification wouldn’t become a national priority for another fifteen years, nearly a decade after the last of fifteen million gas-powered Model T’s had rolled off Henry Ford’s assembly line in Highland Park, Michigan. Neither these setbacks nor World War II deterred those pursuing Tachibana’s vision, and by the 1950s, his company Space Incenicon had been joined in the race for eV swaps by Panair S.A. (Torino), the French-Belgian industrial concern Sonclime, and the Soviet People’s Corporation for Conductive Technologies, known as spactrio. These beautiful artifacts survive as fossils to this noble pursuit, waiting, inevitably, to be revived again.

Published December 7, 2023. Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Hoefler.