Numbers, please! 105.882 km/h speed record to sell 12 km/h electric cabs.
The first car to exceed 100 km/h was an electric vehicle. This was made possible by Belgian racing driver and designer Camille Jenatzy.
On April 29, 1899, Belgian engineer and racing driver Camille Jenatzy broke the magical barrier of 100 kilometers per hour for land vehicles with his torpedo-like electric car “La Jamais Contente” (French for “The Never Satisfied”). With a hand-stopped 105.882 km/h, he beat his rival Count Gaston Chasseloup-Laubat, who had previously reached 92.78 km/h on the same track in the “flying kilometer” on 4 March, on a specially constructed racetrack in the Parc agricole d'Acheres near Paris.
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Jenatzky's record only lasted three years, but in the background of the speed chase organized by the French magazine “La France Automobile”, it was actually about the business of electric cabs that were to operate in Paris. Exactly 125 years ago, Jenatzy's company, the “Compagnie Internationale des Transports Automobiles”, delivered the first of the 30 electric cabs it had ordered. They drove through the city at a carriage- and pedestrian-compatible 12 km/h with a range of 70 kilometers.
The year before the universally admired “record of the century”, racing driver Chasseloup-Laubat had reached 63.158 km/h on the 2-kilometre-long d'Archeres racetrack in a carriage-based vehicle named Jeantaud Duc, eventually improving this record to 92.78 km/h.
(Image:Â Jules Beau, gemeinfrei)
The eldest son of the French Minister of the Navy under Napoleon III drove a streamlined vehicle for the Jeantaud car brand, which is reminiscent of a soapbox, with the difference that the driver sits on it in an aerodynamically unfavorable position.
Record attempts with cab companies in mind
The car designer Charles Jeantaud financed the record attempts because he was looking for orders from Parisian cab companies. At the turn of the century, they were looking for a replacement for the horse-drawn cabs that were polluting the streets of Paris with huge amounts of excrement.
His competitor, the Belgian Camille Jenatzy, son of a rubber manufacturer from Schaarbeek, took a similar approach. He took the chassis of one of his already constructed “Wagonette Jenatzy” taxi-fiakers and had a “racing cigar” made of partinium built on it, which was closely based on the navy torpedoes developed at the time. Two electric motors on the rear axle with a combined output of 50 kW from Postel-Vinay and 100 2V lead-acid batteries from the Fulmen company completed the set-up for his record attempt.
The batteries alone weighed 750 kilograms. In total, the “La Jamais Contente” weighed 1450 kilos, was 3.80 meters long and 1.40 meters high. Not forgetting the new pneumatic racing tires from Michelin, for which the tire company from Clermont-Ferrand was awarded the consisting of 42 tires, Bibendum had just launched a major advertising campaign (for cyclists) and co-financed the record attempt.
Record-breaking car as an advertising medium for tires and e-drive
Jenatzy thus decided against the solid rubber wheels from his father's factory and left his “La Jamais Contente” to Michelin for further tire tests and advertising appearances after the record run. Meanwhile, the “racing cigar” was shown at numerous motor shows and other exhibitions as a vehicle of the future, signaling that the future belonged to the electric drive.
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This was all the more true when the young engineer Ferdinand Porsche solved the problem of power transmission at the wheel axle with his Porsche-Lohner wheel hub motor, rather than the motor drive of the “La Jamais Contente”.
But the future took a wrong turn. This may also apply to Camille Jenatzy, who as a racing driver with his red beard was also known as the “diable rouge”. His company, which built electric cabs in Paris, was forced to close in 1901. Jenatzy then became a racing driver for Mercedes. In Germany, he became known as the “red Mephisto” as an advertising medium for spark plugs.
Death came not on the track, but in the bushes
In 1913, he invited friends to a hunting party on his estate and during the night had the idea of grunting like a wild boar in the bushes. He was shot dead. “His talent for imitating animal noises was his undoing,” he says laconically in a SWR documentary about speed records.
(Image:Â CC BY-SA 4.0, Claus Ableiter)
His electric car “La Jamais Contente” outlived him by many years. Pretty battered, it was bought by battery supplier Fulmen in 1933 and thoroughly restored. It was then transferred to the automobile museum in Compiègne Castle. There is also a replica built by Belgian engineering students in 1993, which is shown at motor shows as a milestone in the development of electric vehicles and can otherwise be viewed at the Mühlhausen Automobile Museum.
“The never-satisfied one” (cars are feminine in French) did not keep her record for long. Soon the combustion engines, the “stink boxes”, as the bicycle manufacturer Adam von Opel called them, won. Exactly 10 years after Jenatzy's record ride, the Benz Blitz broke the 200-kilometer-per-hour mark. It took another 100 years for the Monegasque company Venturi and students from Ohio University to create a modern electric version of Jamais Contente, which set a world record of 515 km/h on a salt lake in the US state of Utah.
Of course, this record is also passé because Venturi achieved 549.4 km/h with a successor model – You're never satisfied.
(mack)
