NYT: ‘Electric Vehicles Died a Century Ago. Could That Happen Again?’

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Not the latest model

The EV ‘transition’ is on the skids in the US since the last President left the stage. What effect this might have in other countries remains to be seen. If political parties opposed to compulsory EVs get the upper hand, does the whole motor industry change tack? The author claims the earlier EVs were undermined by politics, but car buyers were making their own choices. Today choice is being taken away in many places, like the UK and much of Europe.
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Battery-operated vehicles were a mainstay more than a hundred years ago, but only a few still exist — one happens to be in Jay Leno’s garage. By Ivan Penn – BURBANK, Calif. for the NYT (New York Times, via Climate Depot).

– More than a century before Tesla rolled out its first cars, the Baker Electric Coupe and the Riker Electric Roadster rumbled down American streets.

Battery-powered cars were so popular that, for a time, about a third of New York’s taxis were electric.

But those early electric vehicles began to lose ground to a new class of cars, like the Ford Model T, that were cheaper and could more easily be refueled by new oil-based fuels that were becoming available around the country. Bolstered by federal tax incentives in the 1920s, the oil industry boomed – and so did gasoline-powered cars.

That history has largely been forgotten, and almost all of the early electric cars have disappeared so completely that most people alive today have never seen one – and many have no idea that they even existed. A few specimens are in museums and private collections, including a fully restored Baker Electric that Jay Leno keeps in his sprawling California garage.

Leno’s ancient electric car has a wooden frame and 36-inch rubber wheels. It looks like a stagecoach, but it is propelled by electric motors and batteries just like a current-day Tesla Model Y or Cadillac Lyriq. It elicited smiles and amazement from people on the streets of Burbank, California, when Leno drove it around town recently.

The car may be a novelty, but it is newly relevant because the United States may be poised to repeat history.

The Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are working to undercut the growth of electric vehicles, impose a new tax on them and swing federal policy sharply in favor of oil and gasoline.

Scholars who have studied the earlier age of electric vehicles see parallels in their demise in the early decades of the 1900s and the attacks they are facing now. In both eras, electric cars struggled to gain acceptance in the marketplace and were undermined by politics. A big knock against them was they had to be charged and ultimately were considered less convenient than vehicles with internal combustion engines.

“Electric cars are good if you have a towing company,” President Donald Trump said at a campaign rally in Iowa in October 2023. At another appearance the next month, he said, “You can’t get out of New Hampshire in an electric car.”

Charging and access to fuel were also concerns a century earlier.

Full article here.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2025/05/29/nyt-electric-vehicles-died-a-century-ago-could-that-happen-again/