The Electric Car: A Long and Complex History
By Jim ResnickLet’s get one thing straight: The electric car is no Silicon Valley brainchild. It didn’t arrive on a wave of venture capital or materialise from some secretive lab humming with sci-fi ambitions. It was born in an era when your great-great-grandmother grabbed headlines from a newsboy in a bowler hat and carefully tiptoed around horse manure on every corner.At the dawn of the 20th century, electric vehicles were the stars of American roads. Then they vanished. Then they came back. Then they vanished again. In automotive terms, the electric car became a ghost — a recurring apparition that kept getting exorcised. We know how the story ends, but how we got here is one long, strange detour.In the BeginningWay back in the 1830s, Robert Anderson of Scotland built a motorised carriage that was truthfully more a philosophical statement than a practical vehicle. The era’s galvanic cells were neither rechargeable nor long-lasting. Impressive as a parlour trick; useless as a commuter.Also ReadEV startups seek govt intervention: CII writes to PMO, flags PLI flawspremiumEV sales jump nearly 70% in Jan-Apr; momentum sustains beyond March spikeOla Electric delivers 20% MoM growth in April, continues recovery momentumOben Electric eyes 3x sales growth on new launches, network expansion: CEOIndia EV sales double, mid-market surges as entry segment shrinksBy 1837, a fellow inventor, Robert Davidson, had constructed a prototype electric locomotive capable of hauling six tons at a blistering four miles an hour.The parlour-trick phase ended in 1859, when Gaston Planté of France unveiled the rechargeable lead-acid cell. By 1884, Thomas Parker — already famous for electrifying the London Underground — turned his attention to electric cars. A decade later in Iowa, William Morrison patented an electric carriage he’d been tinkering with since 1887. It offered a 50-mile range, four horsepower and a 20-mile-per-hour top speed.Morrison debuted his machine at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and caused a genuine sensation, and then promptly redirected his focus to battery chemistry rather than the car itself. History would prove him prophetic. Battery chemistry remains a chief argument today, 130 years later.Electricity WinsBy 1900, roughly a third of all American vehicles were electric. Given the competition, this made sense. Gasoline engines demanded brutal hand-cranking to start, a process that occasionally broke wrists and sent crank handles snapping back into their operators’ faces. Steam engines, meanwhile, had a rare but spectacular habit of exploding. Electricity, by comparison, seemed the polite option.Before Henry Ford had mass-produced a single gas-powered car, a company called Columbia in Hartford, Conn., already had 1,000 electrics on the road. Entire fleets of electric taxis worked the streets of New York City. By 1910, Detroit Electric was selling roughly 2,000 cars a year, perceived as a refined luxury vehicle.The Baker Motor Vehicle Company in Ohio flourished at the same time with its Imperial Runabout, which found a particularly notable home: Thomas Edison’s garage. Women overwhelmingly preferred electrics — no arm-wrenching cranks required. In one of history’s better ironies, Clara Ford (Henry’s wife) drove a Detroit Electric.The FallIn 1908, the first Ford Model T cost $850, considerably cheaper than most electrics. (That’s roughly $30,000 today.) By 1912, Ford had slashed that to $590, while a comparable electric still ran $1,750. By 1923, the Model T’s entry price had cratered to $290 ($5,700 in today’s dollars).The next nail in the coffin came courtesy of Charles Kettering, who introduced the electric starter for combustion engines in 1912.One by one, gasoline’s weaknesses disappeared. Mass production drove costs down; a sprawling network of filling stations made refuelling effortless and cheap. Nobody yet knew or particularly cared what burning fossil fuels would do to the atmosphere. Adventure beckoned. The electric car retreated.Driven UndergroundBeaten but not dead, the electric car went underground, surfacing every decade or so.By the mid-1960s, the American automotive culture found itself in a muscle car arms race. Pontiac GTOs, Oldsmobile 442s, Ford Mustangs and Chevy Camaros bellowed to the tune of 400 high-octane horsepower. Amid this V-8 soundtrack, General Electric rolled out the Delta prototype in 1967, an experimental electric that could manage 40 miles of range and a top speed of 55 m.p.h. It had two fatal flaws, however. It would never have met looming safety standards. And it was breathtakingly ugly.Ford and General Motors also floated electric concepts in the ’60s, but none credibly exceeding 80 miles of range, and all would have been far too expensive to produce.Meanwhile, California’s worsening smog had real political consequences. In 1967, Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the California Air Resources Board into existence, an agency that later became central to the industry.And then, Nasa inadvertently stepped into the electric picture.Planning the Apollo lunar missions, engineers faced a fundamental problem: Combustion engines require air. They won’t work on the Moon. Between Boeing and GM’s Delco subsidiary, the electric lunar rover was born. To this day, lunar rovers are the only vehicles to ever operate on another world. All three Apollo-era rovers remain parked exactly where astronauts left them in 1971 and 1972.The first Opec oil embargo of 1973 sent shock waves through the American economy and, almost as a side effect, revived interest in non-petroleum vehicles. Enter the 1974 Sebring-Vanguard CitiCar, a wedge-shaped oddity that some compared to a golf cart with windows. It topped out around 40 m.p.h., delivered 40 miles of range, and sold nearly 4,500 units between 1974 and 1982 — the highest-production American electric since World War II, a record it held until Tesla arrived.The First Modern EVThe GM EV1 arrived in 1996 as an honest-to-goodness clean-sheet design that saw production; no borrowed platform, no retrofitted guts, no concept dressed up for show. It proved aerodynamic, downright fast (0 to 50 m.p.h. in seven seconds), and offered 80 miles of real-world range. It is widely acknowledged as the first truly modern EVLess widely known, GM fired up the EV1 project after California had mandated that a small percentage of cars sold in the state be zero-emission. That meant electric cars. Rivals responded by electrifying existing models like Toyota’s RAV4 EV. GM built something entirely new.But EV1 driving had one giant catch: You couldn’t buy one. Customers could only lease them.About 800 EV1s were leased, mainly in the Southwest, starting in 1996. Production stopped in 1999. By 2003, GM recalled every single one and crushed most of them, an act of corporate self-destruction that still provokes anger among EV advocates. A handful survived, though, with a few landing in university programs, some in private collections. In October 2025, one surfaced at a Georgia collector car auction and sold for $104,000.The Spark That Lit TeslaIn the smouldering wreckage of the EV1 chapter, a small San Dimas, Calif., start-up called AC Propulsion had already been quietly building its “tZero,” a lightweight electric sports car with a 150-kilowatt induction motor that could hit 60 m.p.h. in about 4.5 seconds.An engineer, Martin Eberhard, commissioned AC Propulsion to build a version using the new lithium-ion cells beginning to migrate out of laptops and consumer electronics into more ambitious applications. The resulting car was lighter and faster and reportedly cost $220,000 to build.AC Propulsion declined to build it.That rejection drove Eberhard and his partner Marc Tarpenning to found Tesla Motors in 2003. A venture capitalist named Elon Musk soon joined.The Revival YearsIn 2008, Tesla’s first production car, the Roadster, built on a Lotus Elise platform, became the first electric vehicle to deliver more than 200 miles of range. In 2011, Nissan’s Leaf became the first mass-market EV from a mainstream automaker. In 2012, the Tesla Model S swept nearly every automotive award in existence and made the case that an electric sedan could outperform its gasoline rivals.The barriers that killed the electric car in the 1910s — inconvenience, expense, limited range, a lack of infrastructure — have largely been dismantled. More than a dozen EVs under $40,000 now pepper the U.S. market, well below the current $50,000 median new-car transaction price. And more than 10 million electric vehicles now roam the world’s roads.Yet, one type of electric vehicle remains in a class by itself, the only machine to drive on another globe, still parked quietly on the lunar surface.
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