THE KÜTNE READER

Last of five parts Who was the first person in the Kootenay Boundary to own an electric car since their re-emergence and where was the first charging station installed? Although these events occurred less than a decade ago, it wasn’t as easy to answer these questions as I expected. I asked Trish Dehnel of the Accelerate Kootenays initiative, which promotes the use of electric vehicles. “2011 was the first year that modern EVs rolled out with the Nissan Leaf,” she says. “We h

Fourth of five parts Alexander Zuckerberg of Castlegar’s Zuckerberg Island had an electric car in the mid-1950s. An ingenious man, he no doubt built it himself. John Charters wrote in the Summer 1997 edition of BC Historical News : “When he had reached retirement age his back was bent with arthritis and he could no longer ride his black bicycle so he built a concrete causeway to the island for his electric car. The difficulty with this idea was the fact that the car would not

Third in a series on local electric cars The most noteworthy early electric vehicle in our area belonged to a Kootenay lumber baron, the appropriately-named Alfred Edward (Ted) Watts (1856-1937). Known as a special touring phaeton, it was manufactured in London in 1903 by the City and Suburban Electric Carriage Co., based on the Columbia design by the Electric Vehicle Co. of Hartford. It cost £700 new, which is something like $34,000 Cdn today. Ad from an unknown publication.

Second of five parts In 2016, John Mackie of The Vancouver Sun wrote an interesting story about early electric vehicles, and called Nelson “a hotbed of electric cars,” because it had its own power plant. He quoted one old car expert as saying “Nelson was the greatest place on Earth for electric cars. The city had plug-ins all around town.” Indeed, the Calgary Herald of Oct. 12, 1912, noted Nelson’s “public services and institutions, including electric cars, electric light,

First of five parts Was the first automobile ever seen in this region electric? With the current push to better accommodate electric vehicles in our area, it’s an interesting question. The Grand Forks Evening Sun reported on March 3, 1905: Grand Forks citizens will have an opportunity of seeing an automobile spinning along the thoroughfares of this city during the coming summer, for it is stated that Superintendent Hodges of the Granby company has ordered a machine, which wi