Articles on promising new battery technologies appear in the technical literature with not-too-surprising regularity, so these quotes from such an article¹ might seem commonplace: 

It was in the early eighties that the public began to think about “stored electricity,” which could be bought by the can, as it were, like any other commodity. This dream has come true… A recent average of 144.35 miles on a single charge was made in a family-type electric vehicle equipped with the new battery.

…lighter and cleaner than the lead cell, with lower cost of operation and upkeep…and possessing the hitherto unheard-of properties of remaining undeteriorated either by overcharging or being left undercharged.

…extremely light weight—which not only lightens the construction of the vehicle, but increases the proportion of “paying load” carried by the same—and by its ruggedness in service.

Another interesting performance of the battery in city work, on a single 7 ½-hour charge, is a “run-about” of an hour and a half to two hours every day for seven days.

Nothing too remarkable so far, correct? The best-selling electric car in the world, the Nissan LEAF, has an EPA range of 175 km (109 miles), so the claim of 144 miles on a charge seems a modest improvement. The prospect of running about all week on a single charge also seems promising, until we apply some simple math.

Looking at the last quotation, assuming the total run-about time for seven days is 10 hours, and the single-charge range is 144 miles, we can conclude the average speed over those 10 hours is less than 14.4 miles per hour (mph). Indeed, a closer reading of the document reveals that the average speed over several test trips was 10.93 mph.

Now might be a good time to look closely at the citation for the article. Note the publication date, January 14, 1911, and the inventor of the battery under consideration is none other than the famous Thomas A. Edison. Edison was apparently quite the proponent of the electric vehicle in his day!

While the article in question does not explicitly name the test vehicle, we can reach at least one conclusion about the friction losses of the cars of that time. Note that the battery’s energy capacity (of the eight-cell construction) is given as 360 watt-hours, or in modern terms, 0.36 kWh. Compare that to the Nissan LEAF battery, which is rated at 30 kWh, or nearly 100 times that of the Edison battery, but offering less range!

From this, we conclude that the car of 1911 must have been far more efficient than its modern counterpart. Of course, most of that efficiency gain is due to the lower average speed. Given the principle that drag increases as the square of velocity, the drag on a vehicle at 60 mph would be about 36 times that of the drag at 10 mph, so we can speculate that if the 1911 car could be driven at 60 mph, its range would decrease to about 4 miles, or about 1/27th that of the LEAF but with 1/100th of the battery capacity, so still nearly four times as efficient as the LEAF.

REFERENCES
1. Baker, J. B. (Jan. 14, 1911), “Thomas A. Edison’s Latest Invention: A Storage Battery Designed and Constructed from the Automobile User’s Point of View,” Scientific American, pp. 30-47.