Bob Beaumont, 1932–2011

Bob Beaumont was filling up at a gas station in the late 1960s when he had a brainstorm. “I thought, there’s got to be a better way than to pump this stuff out of the ground” only to have it pollute the air, he later said. He soon sold his Kingston, N.Y., Chrysler dealership and moved to Florida, where he developed the first mass-produced electric car of the internal-combustion era. For several years in the mid-1970s, his company, Sebring-Vanguard, was the sixth-largest car manufacturer in the U.S.

Beaumont was born in Teaneck, N.J., served in the Air Force, and briefly studied business. His electric car, inspired by the lowly golf cart and the Apollo Lunar Roving Vehicle, appeared on the market “just as the Arab oil embargo was ending in 1974,” said The New York Times. The CitiCar was about 8 feet long and “shaped like a cheese wedge.” In its final form, Beaumont’s creation had a 4.4-kilowatt engine, a top speed of about 50 mph, and a range of some 40 miles.

Beaumont sold more than 2,000 CitiCars at about $3,000 each, said The Washington Post. Buyers “came flocking to us like we were the salvation of the world,” he later said. But Consumer Reports deemed the CitiCar “foolhardy to drive,” and the venture went bankrupt in 1977 as the oil crisis eased. Beaumont’s design was later purchased by another company, which used it as the basis for the Comuta-Van, a right-hand-drive vehicle sold exclusively to the U.S. Postal Service. Beaumont developed another design in the early 1990s; though it failed, he lived to see Detroit build electric cars after all.

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