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What do a Packard limousine and a Renault Dauphine have in common? Before you say absolutely nothing, get a load of the Henney Kilowatt.

Here is a link to their 1959 brochure
lov2xlr8.no/brochures/misc/henney/henney.html

A Renault Dauphine converted to electric by Henney, to order for the National Union Electric Corporation.

If you can believe the bullshit on the last page not only did Henney build electric cars but also Packards, Fords,Nike missile trailers, aluminum trucks, crash and reentry vehicles and a lot of other stuff.

Volumes of information on what the vehicle doesn't have, e.g., air cleaner, exhaust system, spark plugs, 'delicate' carburetor, etc. but not a single word about range. Funny I don't remember this at all... heaven knows I was around. I do remember the gas powered Renault Dauphine as being a complete bust as far as mechanical reliability at the time. Our neighbors had one... sat by the curb motionless for years.

The Renault Dauphine routinely makes all the lists of the world's 10 worst cars. And deservedly so. Even if the range of the Henney Dauphine was as little as 40 miles, that might have been longer than the range of gasoline Dauphine before the first breakdown.

From www.coachbuilt.com:

The Kilowatt was produced using Renault Dauphine's supplied to Henney by the French automaker without a drivetrain. Two models were produced, 1959's 36-volt version used 18 two-volt batteries and had a top speed of 40 mph. Although the car could travel over 40 miles on a single charge, its somewhat pokey top speed was deemed unacceptable so an all-new 72-volt system was developed by Victor Wouk using a new controller and 12 6-volt batteries. It debuted on the 1960 Kilowatt which had a top speed of 60 mph with a range to match (60 miles per charge).

Renault sold 100 rolling chassis to Henney for the project, but less than half that number were built as Henney's parent company, National Union Electric Corp., was unable to produce the revised 72-volt systems cheaply enough to keep the car within it's $3600 target price. The unfinished Kilowatt chassis were reportedly sold to a Renault dealer in Florida who retrofitted them with standard Renault drivetrains, and then sold them as new, stock Dauphines.

An article in U.S. News & World Report states that 32 Henney Kilowatts were purchased by various US electric utilities. twenty-four (24) 1959 Kilowatts and eight (8) 1960 models. Of the often-reported figure of 47 completed Kilowatts, it's unclear when the remaining 15 cars were produced, or who purchased them. The article states that some may have been sold as 1961 or possibly 1962 models.

Of the documented 32-47 Henney Kilowatts produced, two remain in a drivable state and it's believed that four to eight others remain in various un-operable states. Even though the Henney Kilowatt never reached mass production volume, its transistor-based electric technology paved the way for modern EVs like GM's EV1.

Renault Dauphine, one of the few cars you could improve by removing the engine lol.

One Henny - Renault cars is at the Lane Motor Museum , Nashville , Tn. I have seen tat car.

Watch the video to learn about a secret switch at its steering column.

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="480" height="390" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/FYbiaCRwwAU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Well, it isn't easy to offer a positive summary of such a concept car, even an usual Dauphine was unconvincing, but we shouldn't forget that the constructors of the Dauphine Kilowatt were looking for an answer to a question we still looking for 50 years later. Sorry for being the spoil of the party.


[picture source: wikipedia]

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Rusty, just to illustrate the missing representativeness of a lot of French cars please find attached an optical comparism with a ZIL. Imagine that the showed Renault Fr?gate has been the state carriage of the French president. La Grande Nation ...


[picture source: Le Figaro]

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Friends

The violinist Jascha Heifitz owned a Henney Kilowatt in anticipation of the petroleum situation that we now find ourselves in.

I remember the Dauphines when they were new as an alternative to a Volkswagen, as were the Panhards. They were rather rare.

Their problem seems to have been that the radiator had a blind to help it warm up in cold weather. As the radiator was between the engine and the rear seat, ti was hard to know if it was stuck in the "up" position. This lead to many fried engines .

Henry Ford worked for Detroit Edison before he struck out on his own. One day Edison took him for a walk in a park while he was working on is first car. Edison told him not to bother with electric cars. batteries were a problem. Over 100 years later the range of the batteries is not substantially different.

Regards

John Harley

Quote:

John, I have read about a new holistic approach with standardized battery containers and worldwide exchange stations. That's all still up in the air and of course involves several starting points for criticism, as the majority of new ideas. But we have to think new.

Guscha

I'm a fan of hybrids- Diesels can be made to run on almost anything, so that would buy us time to find a responsible fuel. i. e. not ethanol.

Batteries have to be charged by power plants, which is pushing the pollution one step back . As we've seen recently, power plants have their own set of problems

Regards

John Harley