By now, most people know the Rivian story in which a scrappy startup electric automaker brought a mothballed Mitsubishi plant back to life, hired 8,000 people, and has now gone on to make more than 100,000 vehicles.
Fewer may know Rivian was not the first EV maker in Bloomington-Normal.
The story of the mid-20th century experimental electric battery-powered car made in Bloomington-Normal by the Eureka-Williams Corporation is a colorful one, according to McLean County Museum of History Librarian Bill Kemp.
“The car was known as the Henney Kilowatt,” said Kemp.
The Kilowatt, made in 1959 and 1960, is one example of that curious period before the electric era really picks up in the 1990s, said Kemp.
“Only 200 or slightly fewer were ever made. Of those only 46 or 47 were ever sold," Kemp said.
Even the Kilowatt was not the first electric vehicle on Bloomington-Normal streets. In the early years of the automobile, electric cars competed with gasoline-powered vehicles.
“In 1911, The Pantagraph estimated there were about 30 electric runabout automobiles, tooling around the city streets," said Kemp. "At that time, there were only several hundred automobiles all told. But the electric auto will disappear from the scene as far as the American consumer is concerned. It will reappear briefly and blips and blobs here and there in experimental prototypes.”
The Henney Kilowatt auto had a repurposed Renault, Dauphin body. The French automaker did not have success in the U.S. with that model and shipped a lot of them back to France.
“The Kilowatt project folks decided this would be a perfect car to re-purpose, so they gutted it, and it proved very lightweight. It was also engineered with the engine in the rear trunk which fit well the engineering design of the Kilowatt because the battery packs would mostly be in the rear trunk,” said Kemp.
The idea for the car came from C. Russell Feldman, president of National Union Electric Company, a conglomerate that coalesced around a company that made car radios. The industrial conglomerate owned Eureka-Williams Corporation, based in Bloomington. It owned the Henney Motor Company, and the Exide Battery Corporation. Henney motors and exide batteries were used in the Kilowatt.
“Eureka-Williams had excellent employees. They did precision machine work. They had qualified engineers. Eureka-Williams is credited with designing and building the electric car’s propulsion system, although they did consult with Victor Wouk who was at the California Institute of Technology and one of the fathers of the electric car in the United States,” said Kemp.
Initial marketing of the vehicle was to electric utilities. The start and stop feature of an electric vehicle fit with certain industry jobs such as meter readers and bill collectors. It also was a good runabout for workers at large utility plants.
“Electric utilities, at one time, marketed all things electric from electric stoves to hair dryers, and the electric auto fit into this envisioned world of all electric juice," said Kemp. "They used the Henney Kilowatt to promote this space age future of electric automobiles. Unfortunately, the Henney Kilowatt was probably 70 years too early.”
The 1959 prototype had 18 two-volt batteries. Top speed was about 40 mph and the range on flat ground was about 40 miles. The 1960 model had a little more oomph, said Kemp. It had 12 six-volt batteries, a top speed of 60 mph, and a range of 60 miles. It came in three colors: black, red, and gray.
Eureka-Williams wanted to push the vehicle as a second family car, for suburban commuters to get to a rail station. The sticker price was $3,500, though that was below cost. Today, that would be about $37,000. But the car fizzled out and was forgotten.
“About 70 of the automobiles were stored at a warehouse on South Center Street near downtown. They were hauled away in one lot in the mid-1970s down to Florida to an auto dealer,” said Kemp.
Some do survive today in private collections, and in a few museums.
