Audi recently flighted a number of advertisements about its new all-electric car. This is due in 2019 and, if my job was to be an electrical reviewer, I might well go on from there, citing charge times, range, power performance and how to jump-start it if the battery is flat.

But I am not going to do that; I am going to go back to days of the distant past, when something very similar happened to that which is happening now.

In the 1960s and 1970s, computers were developing. The large computer firms included Univac, Unix, Honeywell, IBM, et cetera. Of all these, IBM had the biggest following. The computer idea was this: there was a ‘mainframe’, which was a whole lot of cabinets containing electronic cards that performed various functions. This was the heart of the machine and was located in an room the size of a very large garage. Programs had to be loaded into the computer mainframe from storage media – a magnetic tape or punched cards. The mainframe then stored and executed the program and printed the output (with a printout of the program) on a very fast line printer (could print the whole Bible in six hours). Program execution time was fractions of a second. Storage magnitude was of the order of 360 kB. Yes, kilobytes.

With the development of the Intel 8080 microprocessor, together with storage chips that could store 512 kB of memory, it became obvious that it was possible that a computer could be developed that was significantly smaller than the mainframe computers. The main market demand was for a computer which would do word processing and spreadsheet calculations. Games would also be nice.

The first personal computer available that could do all this was the Apple II. Its spreadsheet program, VisiCalc, was revolutionary, if a bit slow. The word processor program, WordStar, was pretty average but it was really all that was available.

There were, at the time, a number of computers with different operating systems. These did not include an IBM product. Then, in 1981, the first IBM computer appeared and was followed by other computers which were IBM compatible. A killer part of the IBM was the spreadsheet program Lotus 123. It was clever and fast. IBM also had WordPerfect, which made WordStar seem very clunky.

Where I am going with all of this is the future of the development of the electric car. The first effective electric car was constructed by Alan Cocconi. He used lithium-ion batteries and built a driver/inverter to drive a 400 Hz motor from an aircraft compressor. The motor drove the front wheels of a converted Honda Ballade through the second gear. Using a 400 Hz motor was genius – normal 50 Hz motors are way heavier than 400 Hz motors. It was a step forward – but it is not the end.

My point is this: with personal computers, there are a number of different models of operating system. What people wanted was a decent word processing system and a decent spreadsheet program. The fact that these all arrived as one with Lotus 123/WordPerfect and the IBM personal computer was something which just had to happen, sooner or later. Thus, the IBM personal computer became the standard.

In a similar way, what people want in an electric car is speed, performance and . . . range. Audi can boast all it wants but the range of about 400 km and the fact that the on-board battery has to be charged up mean that the definitive electric car, like the desktops before the IBM personal computer, has not yet arrived. The Tesla cars and the Audi will never be the standard until the energy storage system problem is solved and this will not be achieved by using batteries. I am waiting expectantly.