A journey through time to understand why the future runs on batteries
Chi immaginerebbe che il motore elettrico sia più antico di quello a benzina?
Who would have thought that the electric motor is older than the petrol engine?
At the beginning of the 20th century, 38% of cars on the road were electric, 40% were steam-powered and only 22% were petrol-powered. Even Henry Ford, despite building millions of Model Ts for the masses, preferred to drive an elegant electric car.
This was the starting point for the conference “Electric mobility: past, present and future”, promoted by the Osservatorio Allestimenti during Key 2025 in Rimini and attended by two of the most authoritative voices of the CNR: Vincenzo Palermo, director of the Institute for Organic Synthesis and Photoreactivity, and Nicola Armaroli, one of the most internationally cited scientists and popularisers.
The meeting intertwined history and thermodynamics, society and science, to explain how electricity is redefining not only mobility, but the very way we think about energy.
The electric motor that changed the internal combustion engine
In his speech, Vincenzo Palermo reconstructed the fascinating history of the electric motor: born before the combustion engine, forgotten for a century and now back in the spotlight. At the beginning of the 20th century, steam, electric and petrol cars coexisted. The former were clean and quiet, the latter noisy and difficult to start, and the third more economical and with greater autonomy. Paradoxically, it was the small electric motor that determined the success of the internal combustion engine: it was used to start it, eliminating the need for a crank and making it accessible to everyone. From there, history took a well-known direction. Today, as then, technological innovation is not just a matter of efficiency, but of a culture of change. Palermo showed how every energy revolution arises from a combination of industrial choices, collective fears and habits that are difficult to break.
The silent revolution of efficiency
Nicola Armaroli’s presentation was a journey through physics and chemistry. An internal combustion car uses only 34% of the energy contained in fuel: the rest is lost as heat. It is a system born in an era when efficiency was not a necessity. The electric motor, on the other hand, transforms almost all the energy it receives into motion, reducing waste, noise and emissions. It is a linear and clean mechanism, in which energy is transferred by flows rather than combustion.To travel 100 km, a petrol car consumes on average over 6 litres of fuel (approximately £12), while an electric car uses the equivalent of 16 kWh, with an average cost of between £5 and £10, depending on the type of charging. After 200,000 km, an electric car has emitted less than half the CO₂ of a traditional vehicle, even when taking into account battery production and charging.
Energy is not burned, it is orchestrated
In the new paradigm, electricity is no longer just an alternative fuel, but an energy platform. Electric cars become “batteries on wheels”, integrated into the grid through vehicle-to-grid technologies: they can return energy to the grid at peak times and store it when renewable production is in excess. ‘One million vehicles connected simultaneously,“ Armaroli pointed out, ‘would represent a storage capacity greater than that of many traditional power plants.” A distributed system, where car parks become energy infrastructures and the grid dynamically adapts to people’s behaviour. In this vision, electric mobility is not just a means of transport, but an active component of the national electricity system.
Another crucial issue is that of resources: lithium, rare metals, recycling.
Another crucial issue is that of resources: lithium, rare metals, recycling.
According to Armaroli, global lithium reserves are estimated at 115 million tonnes in 2025, of which 30 million are already exploitable: enough to produce 3.5 billion electric cars, more than double the global fleet. New-generation batteries drastically reduce the use of cobalt and nickel, and recycling and disassembly processes are advancing rapidly. ‘It’s not about extracting forever,’ he stressed, ‘but about creating a closed supply chain: materials that are used, recovered and returned to circulation.’ This is the fundamental difference between a linear economy and a circular economy: the former burns resources, the latter orchestrates them.
Evolution as destiny
The question that closed the conference was not “if” but “when” electric mobility will become dominant. The answers show that the transition could be a return to our origins — only with more mature tools.
For the Allestimenti Observatory, this also means innovation: reading the changes in society and scientific knowledge and translating them into design culture, aware that every technological evolution always begins with an act of vision.