Electric Cars Were Ordinary, Then They Weren't, Then They Were Again
A century ago, a quiet electric car was a perfectly normal way to get around town. Then the job it was good at stopped being the job most drivers wanted done, and a better battery, much later, helped bring it back.
Picture a car from 1914. Tall, upholstered, a bit like a sitting room that's learned to roll. No engine roar, no smoke. You get in, switch it on, and off you go.
That was a 1914 Rauch and Lang, and it was electric. Not a prototype or a curiosity, but the kind of car remembered today as simple to operate, clean, quiet and comfortable. One now sits in a museum collection, which is a polite way of saying the story didn't go the way it looked like it might.
Electric cars weren't a late invention that took a century to arrive. They were ordinary first. Then they faded. Then they came back.
Made for town
Early motoring offered three ways to power a vehicle: steam, electricity and petrol. Each had its quirks. Steam cars could take a long time to get going, sometimes up to 45 minutes in the cold. Petrol cars had to be started with a hand crank, which was hard work and not much fun.
An electric car had neither problem. You switched it on. That was the whole procedure. And electricity was spreading through towns, already powering appliances, lights and streetcars, so putting motors and batteries in carriages seemed a natural next step.
The catch was range. An electric car didn't go very far between charges, and its batteries needed frequent maintenance. In a city, though, that mattered less than you might think. Electrics were ideal for short trips around town, and outside the cities, poor roads meant few cars of any kind could venture far. In compact cities with good wiring, short range wasn't necessarily a handicap.
So the electric car fitted its world rather neatly. By 1900, electrics accounted for around a third of all vehicles on the road.
Then the job changed
Three things then pulled in the same direction.
The first was price. Mass-produced petrol cars got cheap. By 1912 a petrol car cost only US$650, while an electric roadster, a small open two-seater, sold for US$1,750.
The second was distance. Cheap oil made petrol easy to get for rural Americans, and filling stations began popping up across the country. Electricity for recharging, meanwhile, didn't reach most of rural America until the 1930s, and Americans wanted to travel long before that. Petrol cars went much further between fill-ups.
The third is the neat twist. In 1912, makers of petrol cars took two of the electric car's best features, switch-on starting and electric lighting, and added them to their own vehicles. The electric starter did away with the hand crank. The very thing that made electrics pleasant to drive was no longer theirs alone: now a petrol car could be easy to start and go a long way.
Notice what didn't happen. The electric car didn't stop working. It still did short city trips quietly and cleanly. What changed was what most people wanted from a car (more distance, more places, a lower price), and the electric was left serving a smaller and smaller part of that. Steam and electric cars fell out of favour and disappeared from the market in the 1920s, and by 1935 electric vehicles had all but vanished.
A dress rehearsal
The idea never quite went away. Rising oil prices and shortages later in the century revived interest in alternatives, but the electric cars of that era still lagged well behind petrol ones.
The best-known attempt came from a large carmaker in the 1990s: the EV1. It was designed from scratch as an electric car rather than adapted from a petrol one. It had a range of 80 miles, about 130 kilometres, could go from 0 to 50 miles an hour (about 80 km/h) in seven seconds, and quickly gained a cult following.
Then it stopped. High production costs meant the EV1 was never commercially viable, and it was discontinued in 2001. Its maker went on to recall and destroy the cars, after company officials convinced themselves that fuel cells, not batteries, were the future of the electric car.
The EV1 showed the idea could work on the road. It didn't show it could work as a business. Not yet.
The battery catches up
What had to change was the battery.
Older rechargeables stored too little energy for their weight, which meant short range: the same limit that had kept electrics tied to the city a century before. Then came the lithium-ion battery, the rechargeable kind now in your phone. It held more energy for its weight than older types, typically twice as much as nickel-cadmium, and could release it quickly on demand. It's widely seen as having led the electric car's revival.
More energy in the same weight means more distance between charges, which goes straight at the weakness that let petrol win the first time. Places to plug in mattered too: in the US, public money went into building a nation-wide charging network.
None of this happened overnight. The battery's rise was shaped by shifting social, economic and environmental conditions, and worries about safety, cost and durability haven't gone away.
The same problem, solved
It's tempting to tell the electric car's story as a modern invention that finally arrived. The record says otherwise.
Electric cars were here early, and they were ordinary. They lost the first round not because they stopped working, but because cheap petrol, longer journeys and a borrowed starter motor changed what drivers needed. And what brought them back was the very thing that sent them away: how far you could go, and where you could charge. A century later, that was the problem that finally got fixed.
SOURCES
Smithsonian National Museum of American History, "Electric cars: 100 years ago and today." https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/stories/electric-cars-100-years-ago-and-today (accessed 24 Oct 2026, via web.archive.org)
Smithsonian National Museum of American History, "Technological Choices" (America on the Move). https://www.americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/america-on-the-move/online/americans-adopt-auto/technological-choices (accessed 24 Oct 2026, via web.archive.org)
U.S. Department of Energy, "The History of the Electric Car." https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-electric-car (accessed 24 Oct 2026)
Physics Today, "Cold War computers, California supercars, and the pursuit of lithium-ion power." https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/cold-war-computers-california-supercars-and-the-pursuit-of-lithium-ion-power (accessed 24 Oct 2026)
Comments