Nikola Tesla’s Electric Car
In the 1930’s a wireless electric car was already on it’s way to our growing highways. Inventor and electricity fetish man Nikola Tesla took his Pierce Arrow and turned it into a very electrifying ride. It’s main power conductor was a box of radio tubes contained in the vehicle’s glove compartment. The car’s antenna, which was connected to those tubes at one end, would conduct electrical current from the air around it, powering the electric engine for miles.
Nikola Tesla & His Coil
Aside from it sounding insanely unsafe, JP Morgan and it’s investors, who originally funded a production model of this experiment, backed out. Why? They didn’t want to be responsible for a car which ran for free. There were no meters anywhere to read how much energy your car was sucking up. It took no gas to power any aspect of the car. No free rides for us.
Pierce Arrow Hood Ornament
Tesla’s 1930 Pierce Arrow turned electric automobile had an energy receiver (a gravitational energy converter) built by Tesla himself. The converter’s dimensions were a small 60 x 25 x 15cm. It was installed in front of the dashboard and contained 12 vacuum tubes. An antenna approximately 1.8 meters long came out of the converter. The motor achieved a maximum of 1800 RPM’s. Tesla said it was fairly hot when operating, and therefore a cooling fan was required. The car was tested for a week, reaching speeds of 90 miles per hour. Performance data showed it were at least comparable to an automobile using gasoline. At a stop sign, a passerby remarked that there were no exhaust gasses coming from the tailpipe. Sadly, the vehicle was to remain in a farm outside Niagara Falls, and would never be massed produced. Imagine the type of commutes we would be in store for today if the REAL Tesla Car came to mass-production life.
1930 Pierce Arrow
Thank you for honoring Nikola Tesla as a greatest Serbian-American discoverer.
Today we have Tesla Motors, similar but not the same.
I also would like to thank you for writing such nice article about my fellow countryman Tesla. If we just knew what would happen to current economy and all this with high gas cost, maybe we would pay more attention on the patents what Nikola was doing.
And I am very sure that the cost of today’s electric car would be dramatically different and much more affordable if the above Tesla car ever saw the mass production.
im interested in all inventions. also in the new hho generators
Thank you for this article.
Tell me where are the plans for this car?
In government volts or on the internet?
i can say thank you for the Morgan and others same…but we can, i hope…made same or…when the world be free, or…?
i had todo a report on him so that is why i am here
The photo of the 1930 Pierce Arrow appears to have a Jaguar hood ornament – ???
The lower photo is of a Lincoln,not a Pierce Arrow. The hood ornament on the Lincoln is a Greyhound.
Sorry, the story of Tesla’s Pierce-Arrow is a fantasy that started to make the rounds in the late 1960’s. This fantasy story would have died out, but people keep posting it over and over again on the Internet, all referencing each other. The reason no one references any original Tesla documentation is because there is none. He never did it.
Tesla never built an electric Pierce-Arrow, or any other car even remotely like what is claimed.
Tesla actually did accomplish quite a number of great things; why muck up his legacy with make-believe?
I have been working on this electrical generation problem for the past few years. Those of you who think Tesla was crazy or the story was fiction, just wait. I have a new generation of power supplies WORKING that produce FREE electrical power using some of the work done by Tesla. A model to be used in today’s cars, getting unlimited MPG, is months away.