Electric cars died a century ago. Could that happen again?
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 refuelled 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 petrol-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 show host 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 favour of oil and petrol.
A hundred years ago, politicians put their thumbs on the scale — and came down on the side of oil.
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.'
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