Electric vehicles constituted roughly one third of all cars on American roads in the year 1900, vastly outnumbering their loud, smelly, and aggressively dangerous gasoline-powered counterparts.

A closer look

Electric vehicles constituted roughly one third of all cars on American roads in the year 1900, vastly outnumbering their loud, smelly, and aggressively dangerous gasoline-powered counterparts. Early wealthy adopters actually preferred battery-powered transport because it did not require physically cranking a heavy metal handle that could easily snap a careless driver's wrist. The narrative that humanity naturally progressed from horses to gasoline is a carefully constructed fairy tale, completely erasing the era when electric taxis buzzed quietly around New York City. Unfortunately, Henry Ford's mass production of the cheap Model T, combined with the discovery of cheap Texas crude oil, swiftly murdered the electric car industry. We collectively chose a century of geopolitical resource wars and toxic smog simply because battery technology was mildly inconvenient for cross-country road trips at the time