Barcelona's 1943 electric taxi that swapped batteries in minutes — no charging wait at all

In short: back in 1943, Barcelona already had electric taxis that never waited around for a charge. When the battery ran flat, three workers and a small crane swapped it for one already charged, right there in the taxi, and the car was back on the street within minutes. They were also advertised as free of vibration, fumes and bad smells, unlike the petrol cars of the day. Eighty years on, fast charging still makes headlines; the battery swap those taxis relied on has been largely forgotten.

The story was recovered by the blog Foro Coches Eléctricos, based on a period video, and it's worth telling if only because it dismantles the idea that electrifying the taxi is something this decade invented.

A battery you swapped, not one you charged

According to that account, the taxis ran on batteries made by the Barcelona firm Eucort (the author of the original article himself admits some doubt over the company's exact timeline, so we treat it as reasonably reliable, not fully settled). When the charge ran out, the taxi wasn't left stranded, and the driver didn't lose the afternoon plugged into an outlet.

With the help of three workers and a small crane, the depleted battery was removed and a fully charged one put in its place. The original article sums it up this way: for speed, the system "far surpasses" the fast charging so widely talked about today. There are no exact figures for how long the swap took, but the concept is the same one battery-swap stations for electric cars are chasing now: don't wait, replace.

The quiet taxi, free of fumes and vibration

The advertising of the time didn't pitch the electric taxi as an ecological novelty — that concept didn't even exist yet — but as a direct improvement for passenger and driver alike. It was promoted for its "greater simplicity, the absence of vibration, fumes, bad smells, cumbersome gearboxes, and the crank handle," compared with the combustion engines of the era, according to the same article.

The vocabulary has changed, but the sales pitch is identical to any electric-car brochure today: less noise, less smell, fewer parts to break.

What hasn't changed in eighty years

There's no reliable data on what it cost, in 1943 pesetas (Spain's pre-euro currency), to swap a battery on one of those Eucort taxis, so we won't invent a figure. What can be said is this: then, as now, the energy needed to move the car — pesetas spent on batteries in 1943, litres of diesel or kWh of charging today — was the most variable expense in a taxi driver's day. The licence, the insurance or the self-employment contribution are always the same; what rises and falls day to day, depending on how much and how you drive, is the fuel or the charge.

Those 1943 drivers had no way of knowing, ride by ride, how much they were spending on energy against what they were billing. A driver today doesn't know either, unless they track it: it remains one of the deductible taxi expenses that most easily gets lost among loose receipts and app statements.

From guesswork to an app

The real difference between 1943 and today isn't that we now have electric cars — they already existed; it's that you no longer have to keep track by guesswork. On Taxio, every refuelling or charge is logged with its cost and its litres or kWh, and the app matches that expense against what you've billed to show the real profit for each day, not just what the meter reads. At the close of the month or the quarter, that detail is exported ready for your accountant, with nothing left to memory.

The three workers with Eucort's crane are long gone. The problem they were solving — not losing time or money to the car's energy — is, eighty years later, still exactly the same one.