1914 Detroit Electric car gets its first wash in 110 years as expert attempts to get it running again

These guys gave a 1914 Detroit Electric car its first wash in 100 years, and it’s honestly the coolest thing we’ve seen today.

Partly because the car is over 100 years old, and also because any car looks a million times better after its first wash.

And then there’s a third reason, because this 1914 vehicle is electric.

Although, to be fair, this shouldn’t surprise us.

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EVs have been around for longer than we think

Some people tend to believe that EVs are a new thing, and it’s easy to understand why.

Apart from anything else, you’d essentially need to be over 100 years of age to actually remember the first ‘era’ of electric cars, which took place in the early part of the last century.

But then the experiment sort of died away quite quickly and when cars became mainstream, between the 1950s and 1960s, they were powered by gas.

As a result, no one was really talking about electric cars in the 1970s or 1980s or 1990s and so on.

EVs first (re)appeared in the 2000s, and only became huge in the 2010s and 2020s.

But the truth is, electric cars are basically as old as gas cars.

Some might say they’re even older.

The first electric motor was invented in 1828, and the first EV carriage was built in 1835.

Fast-forward to the late 1800s and you’ve got the first human-carrying vehicle powered by electricity – so basically a passenger electric vehicle – created in Paris by a French inventor in 1881.

The Benz Patent-Motorwagen, which many people refer to as the first car in history, was ‘only’ unveiled five years later, in 1886.

The Ford Model T is even newer than that, having been launched in the early 1900s.

These guys want to prove the Detroit Electric car can still work today

The guys behind the AMMO NYC YouTube channel decided to give this ancient EV its first wash because they want to see if they can actually fix it and make it work in today’s world, which sounds difficult but maybe it won’t be.

This car is rare, but mainly only because it’s old.

Between 1907 and 1939, the Anderson Car Company and Lotus apparently build over 13,000 of these.

Most didn’t survive, but this one did.

Interestingly, this 112-year-old Detroit Electric is roughly the same as a modern EV.

It uses batteries – older and less sophisticated, but they’re still batteries – and an electric unit, which means it has fewer moving components when compared to an equivalent gas car from the same era.

This video was published three weeks ago, and we’re presuming they’re going to need some more time to see if they can fix the car.

So stay tuned for that.