Electric Tricycle Replica Review: Super Enlightening, Mildly Terrifying
I'm an advocate for electric cars needing to get back to basics. There's no

need to be running off, sticking in 56-inch touchscreens, or making the EV larger than a

small European state. Really, one of the things we should be working on is taking existing

chassis, finding ways to quickly convert them to EVs, and worrying about all the fancy

stuff later. Nothing new under the sun and all that, which is how I found myself driving a

converted motor tricycle from 140

years ago through the British countryside.
Two weeks ago, journalist Jeremy Hart got in touch with me and asked me if I wanted to

drive a replica of an EV from 1881. The answer, obviously, was yes. Nothing on earth could

be more my jam than this. Once I'd worked out if it was legal for me to actually leave

my house and drive something under the U.K.'s lockdown restrictions, I was straight on

the train to Surrey to have a go in a remake of what was very probably the first-ever

vehicle with a rechargeable battery. 
Not sure what image you were expecting here but: Yes, this is an electric

cargo motor tricycle

from 1881. Or, well, an unbelievably faithful replica of one that Hart commissioned

and artisan bicycle designer Christian Richards built. 
Because the original vehicle was an adaptation rather than a purpose-built chassis, the

yoke-like pedals in front still work and can power the vehicle—and swing wildly,

threatening to take your shins out when it's under motor power. The single seat is at

the top, perched a bit perilously, and the battery is—as it seems to have been on the

original—in a pannier attached to the rear of the bike. The motor drives the big left-hand

wheel and the two smaller wheels are connected to what's surprisingly responsive

steering. 
Now for the facts about this vehicle. It's not really a stat sheet so much as it is

a story. 
Before 1881, there had already been some progress at making electric vehicles happen. á

nyos Jedlik, a Hungarian inventor, had made a small cart that used a motor to move in 1828.

Four years after that, Moritz Jacobi, a Russian engineer, made an electric boat using non-

rechargeable batteries that poisoned its passengers so seriously even the early pioneers of

vehicles were forced to admit they'd succumbed to nitrous fumes.
By 1839, a Scottish inventor called Robert Davidson created something that, today, is

widely credited as being the first electric car. It ran through the streets of Aberdeen,

Scotland, with a passenger, but everything we know about it—which admittedly, is a

surprisingly small amount for what was a huge breakthrough—says it used chemical, non-

rechargeable batteries.
When Hart and Richards set out to replicate the cabin motor tricycle French inventor Gustave Trouvé

took to the streets of Paris in 1881, there was so little documentation that a quick sketch

was basically all there was to go off of. It's significant, as a vehicle, because it

was rechargeable and Trouvé drove it down regular roads—which as anyone who's driven

in Paris knows is kind of an experimental experience even if you're in a well-tested

Renault Clio.
The illustration showed Trouvé's electric tri moto wasn't purpose-built, he had to convert it. He'd

used an existing pedal vehicle made by a British manufacturer and converted the chain to

run from the motor rather than the pedals. And the reason no further information about it

exists is that he took it for a drive, presumably decided it went well, and then

disassembled the whole thing. He took the motor and battery with him to work on an electric

boat project that would lead to him inventing the outboard motor. 
So why anyone would try and recreate the short-lived e-trike? The answer is fairly

straightforward. Hart likes researching the history of electric vehicles and once he'd

found out such a key part of them—like Davidson's car and Jedlik's cart—was

missing, it seemed obvious the thing to do was try to recreate it, especially with a

tantalizing 140-year anniversary coming up. What he hadn't estimated was how difficult

it would be, even with using modern parts for some of it.
When Richards built the trike for Hart's project, he made the frame first—faithful

to the original being a conversion—before using a Maxus battery to power a fairly standard

e-bike motor. Maxus is an electric van company that decided to back the project, which

included providing its own vehicle as transport for the trike to and from Paris, after

regular automakers were less interested. The trike's motor sits almost in the larger

wheel, delivering power via a simple chain drive.
Driving the Thing
When I stepped off a train to have a look at it, the trike was fresh off its own

transport back from France. Which leads me to ask: Have you ever been properly scared by a

bicycle? I have, now.
I'm maybe not the most athletic journalist, especially after spending a year in

enforced lockdown, so clambering into the seat was a pretty ungainly affair. I'm very

grateful Hart didn't laugh at me too much over. At five feet and 10 inches, I'm not

especially short but still had to haul myself a good six inches up into it, putting me well

above a car or modern bicycle's ride height. In the 1880s, of course, people were used

to horseback so this probably felt like a dangerously low sitting position. They also

presumably had slimmer hips than me because staying in the seat was quite challenging and

definitely felt like I could have fallen out of it at any second.
In terms of control, it's very simple. The replica's designers recreated what

looked like the steering and accelerator controls on the one existing image of the original

trike. There's one lever to steer the thing (the long one in front, in the picture

above) and another to ease the vehicle forward as the accelerator.
You perch your feet on a bar to avoid the flailing pedals and use the steering handle

and brake (the handle in the rear of the picture above) to hold on. Obviously, this

isn't how the chassis was even intended to work because it's supposed to be

pedaled, so there's a sort of direct conflict between the number of handles available

to you and the number of hands you actually have—you have to use your left for both the

brake and the accelerator.
The first thing that goes through your mind is, "What the hell was anyone

thinking, doing this?" Yes, this time I knew that the battery was actually very

unlikely to catch fire and the vehicle had been properly engineered for this, but there was

just something incredibly insecure about being on a small seat above a vehicle you

don't totally feel like you're in control of. 
Since the 3 wheel

motorcycle was authentically replicated, it had wobbly, slim wheels and hard rims—no

real tires. So when you add a little bit of electric torque to it and things start moving,

they feel like they might get away from you. The speed of acceleration, driven by that

large wheel, feels a lot faster than it is and like it could just keep going until it

throws you into a ditch. After a few minutes though, you get the hang of it. The

system's simple and it doesn't really need a brake, although it has cushy leather

straps as brake pads, that make a shushing sound when activated.
That was the only cushy thing, though. Not big on heated seats, the 1800s. But the

steering was incredibly responsive, turning both wheels on the two-wheeled side of the

trike in a quick way I didn't totally trust the single, larger wheel to respond to.
The top speed is about three mph—which feels like plenty from the driver's seat.

Aside from being pretty unfamiliar as a vehicle (when Hart described it to me, I was not

imagining an asymmetrical wheel layout), the trike felt both a little bit overpowered and

slightly fragile. The slim frame is built perfectly and has unbelievable balance, thanks to

Richards' incredible craftsmanship. But the point of this vehicle obviously isn't

performance. That wasn't even the point at the time. 
Rather, it's proof of possibility. The guts—or na?veté—it must have taken Trouvé

to decide to casually put the electric trike together are unreal, but it's also

incredibly impressive to see the history of electric vehicles realized again in such an

intensely physical way. I was reminded of this every time it went over a small bump.
It's really easy to think of early EVs as plasticky little city cars or crude

experiments like the Sinclair C5. Even getting something from the 1980s to run on battery

power alone these days feels like a major endeavor. The stop-start history of electric

vehicles over the 20th century—revived at every oil crisis and forgotten as soon as

pipelines start flowing again—makes it really easy to forget that electric technology

originally appeared as a rival to steam, not gasoline.
So, yeah, I can't recommend an 1881 Trouvé trike as a daily runaround. It's got

really no storage space and the road legality, I suspect, is kind of debatable. But as a

clanking, mildly terrifying piece of suck-it-and-see impromptu electric vehicle history,

it's an extremely special thing. At a time when the only vehicles moving under their

own steam were, well, err, literally using their own steam—think great steamboats and huge

steam locomotives—this would have been an incredible piece of nippy engineering. 
And it still is, honestly. While I'd need more than a short trip where I tried not

to break any bit of it (and mostly succeeded, sorry Jeremy) I found I was kind of sold on

the trike element by the time it was over. Compared to riding a regular bike, it offers a

more refined sitting position; you're upright with incredible views and—steering lever

in one hand, accelerator the other—you can't help feeling like you're having an

extremely great time. Like driving a vintage car that forces you to sit properly and peek

over the bonnet rather than slumping down to gaze out the windshield, there's something

very Mary Poppins about it all.