Electric vehicles have a history stretching back to experimental carriages in the 1830s. By around 1900, electric cars were genuine competitors to gasoline alternatives, quieter, easier to operate, and free of the hand-cranking required to start early combustion engines. What changed was not a single moment but a combination of factors: cheaper mass-produced gasoline cars, a practical electric self-starter that removed one of gasoline’s biggest disadvantages, cheap and widely available oil, improved roads, and the limited range of early electric vehicles outside cities.
Daniel assumes electric cars are a modern invention. The correction opens a conversation that covers the early 1900s competition between vehicle types, the role of Ford’s Model T and the electric self-starter, why electric vehicles never fully disappeared, and how better batteries eventually made them viable again. The episode ends on Henry Ford’s wife, who drove an electric car while her husband built the Model T.
DanielMom, do you think electric cars one day are going to take over from gasoline cars?
MomDaniel, that is an interesting question. But here is a more interesting one. Did you know that electric cars were already competing with gasoline cars more than a hundred years ago?
DanielWhat? Are you serious? Electric cars existed a hundred years ago?
MomYes, more than that. The earliest experimental electric carriages appeared in the 1830s. And by around 1900, electric cars were a serious competitor to gasoline cars in the United States. For a while, it was not obvious which technology would win. And then several things happened that pushed electric cars almost completely off the road, until their modern return.
DanielWait, electric cars were seriously competing with gasoline cars in 1900? So, why does nobody talk about that?
MomIt is one of the great forgotten chapters in the history of technology. At the turn of the 20th century, people had three main kinds of automobile—steam, gasoline, or electric. And electric cars were serious contenders. They were quieter, easier to drive, did not produce gasoline exhaust on the street, and did not need a hand crank to start.
DanielHand cranking?
MomEarly gasoline cars had no electric starter. To start the engine, you had to insert a heavy metal crank at the front of the car and turn it by hand. Hard, physically demanding, and genuinely dangerous. The crank could kick back suddenly and break your wrist or dislocate your shoulder.
MomElectric cars just started with a switch.
DanielSo, electric cars were obviously better?
MomFor city driving, many people thought so. Clara Ford, Henry Ford's own wife, drove a Detroit Electric, not one of her husband's gasoline cars. Thomas Edison worked on improving electric car batteries. Electric taxis were operating in New York and London. It genuinely looked like electricity might win.
DanielSo, then what happened?
MomSeveral things changed the competition. First, Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908. Ford kept finding ways to manufacture gasoline cars more efficiently, and the moving assembly line arrived a few years later. Gasoline cars became dramatically cheaper. In 1912, an electric roadster could cost around $1,750.
MomA gasoline car around $650.
DanielSo, the gasoline car suddenly became something ordinary people could afford.
MomSecond, Charles Kettering developed a practical electric self-starter that Cadillac introduced in 1912. Suddenly, gasoline cars no longer had to be hand-cranked to life. And, ironically, electrical technology had just removed one of the gasoline car's biggest disadvantages.
DanielElectric technology saved the gasoline car.
MomAnd there were other pressures, too. Oil discoveries helped make gasoline cheap and widely available. Roads improved, and people wanted to travel farther between cities, where an electric car's limited range became a bigger disadvantage. And outside cities, many Americans still did not have convenient access to electricity.
MomAll of those changes together pushed the market toward gasoline. By the 1930s, electric passenger cars had almost disappeared.
DanielSo, gasoline did not win because of one invention or one obvious advantage. A whole bunch of things changed at once. Price, roads, fuel, range, and convenience.
MomHistorians argue about exactly how inevitable it was. But the point is that we did not collectively sit down and decide gasoline was the right answer. History pushed us there through a combination of technology, economics, and geology.
DanielAnd what about the people? Who wanted to keep going with electric?
MomElectric vehicles never fully disappeared. Milk floats in Britain, golf carts, forklifts in warehouses. Small, slow, short-range vehicles that suited electric power. And interest revived periodically, during the 1970s oil crisis, for example. But the batteries weren't good enough for the range people expected from a car.
DanielSo the same problem that existed in 1900 range was still the problem a century later.
MomThen lithium-ion batteries began to change the equation. The same battery technology that made laptops and smartphones possible eventually made electric cars viable for longer distances. And then growing concerns about what burning fossil fuels does to the atmosphere added urgency that the 1900 version of the story didn't have.
DanielSo, we're kind of running the same race again. Except this time, the stakes are higher and the batteries are better.
MomAnd the people building electric cars today are standing on the shoulders of engineers who were building them in the 1880s and 1890s, most of whom history almost completely forgot.
DanielThe next time someone says electric cars are the future, I'm going to tell them they were almost the past, too.
MomWow! That is the most accurate one-sentence history of the electric car I have ever heard. So, Daniel, what is one thing you are taking with you today?
DanielSo much interesting stuff. So let's see if I can remember all of it. Electric cars go back to the 1830s, and by around 1900, they were serious competitors to gasoline cars in America. But gasoline cars became cheaper. The electric self-starter made them easier to use.
DanielGasoline became widely available. Roads improved, and people wanted cars that could travel farther. All of those things helped push electric cars out of the passenger car market. They never completely disappeared, and much later, better batteries helped make electric cars practical for longer distances again.
DanielSo now, a technology that looked like it had lost more than a century ago is competing, all over again.
MomGasoline did not win, because history held a contest and declared it the better technology. Price, infrastructure, fuel, roads, and new inventions all helped decide which direction the world went.
DanielAnd while all that was happening, Henry Ford's wife was quietly driving an electric car.
MomInteresting. A detail history probably should have paid more attention to.
