[VadeRetro]

Again, as I've heard it, you'd need to add water every 1000 miles or so, coal a bit more often than that.

I can't find that on the stanleysteamers.com page and find it startling, even allowing that some Stanley models had forty-gallon water reservoirs. I'd be generally interested in any sort of performance data you have on Stanleys. I was surprised to see that they held on into the '20s. The real heyday of steam cars was over by sometime much earlier, I think. The Model T was out by about 1905, right? Needs a crank, but dirt cheap and utilitarian.

[medved]

I'm no expert on Stanleys and most of what I think I know is just what I remember hearing and reading. As I recollect hearing it, the issue was decided in the 20's when they perfected electric starters. Much prior to the 20's, gas cars had their own share of problems. It took them a long time to come up with the idea of coils and spark plugs; the early engines had mechanical "clackers", like lighting a match inside the combustion chamber... Oil was provided to the engines via a hand pump at first and a lot of the things we took for granted by the 50's really hadn't been perfected for more than a generation or so. In the 1950's there were still a lot of people driving around who had made the transition from horses to cars in their forties and were never really safe to be with.