Electric Vehicles Died a Century Ago. Could That Happen Again?

New York Times

26-05-2025

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.
Mr. 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, Calif., when Mr. 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 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.
Americans in the 1920s wanted to explore the country. But many rural and suburban areas didn't have electricity. President Franklin D. Roosevelt made a big push to electrify the entire country in 1936 — the last farms were connected to the grid in the early 1970s. That made it difficult to use electric cars in many places.
Republican leaders say that electric vehicles do not deserve subsidies in the tax code and that their tax bill levels the playing field that Democrats had tilted in favor of one technology.
A hundred years ago, lawmakers also put their thumbs on the scale — and came down on the side of oil.
The oil industry has enjoyed numerous tax breaks. One was enacted in 1926 when Congress allowed oil companies to deduct their taxable income by 27.5 percent of their sales. The sponsor of the legislation later admitted that the incentive was excessive.
'We grabbed 27.5 percent because we were not only hogs but the odd figure made it appear as though it was scientifically arrived at,' Senator Tom Connally, the Texas Democrat who sponsored the break, was quoted as saying in a biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, 'Sam Johnson's Boy: A Close-Up of the President From Texas.'
That tax break lasted for decades. It was eliminated for large oil producers and reduced for smaller companies in 1975.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, crude oil became dominant. The Energy Department noted on a timeline on its website that electric cars 'all but disappeared by 1935.'
The triumph of internal combustion made long-distance travel accessible to the masses and helped power the U.S. economy. It also led to deadly urban air pollution and has been a major cause of climate change.
Now, the decades-long tug of war between combustion engine and electric cars is intensifying again, and electric cars may be in trouble, at least in the United States.
Sales of electric cars are growing quickly in most of the rest of world, increasing 35 percent in China in the first four months of the year and 25 percent in Europe, according to Rho Motion, a research firm. But in the United States, sales were up a more modest 11 percent in the first three months of 2025, according to Kelley Blue Book.
Republican leaders are pushing legislation that would eliminate many Biden administration programs intended to promote electric vehicle sales, including a $7,500 federal tax credit. They also want to impose a new annual $250 fee on electric vehicle owners to finance highway construction and maintenance.
While the Republican changes probably wouldn't kill electric vehicles, they could set the industry back years. 'E.V. momentum in the U.S. has slowed, with policy uncertainty mounting,' analysts at Bernstein said in a note this month.
But electric cars have not just been hampered by politics. They also had to overcome gender stereotypes. Their benefits like quiet, smooth operation were considered by some men to be too feminine, and, in the late 1800s and early 1900s, many models like the Baker Electric were explicitly marketed only to women.
Advertisements for the early electrics hang on the walls of Mr. Leno's Burbank garage. 'Make This the Happiest Christmas — Give Your Wife an Electric,' proclaims one. On another, a young woman pleads, 'Daddy Get Me a Baker.'
Men, by contrast, have long been pitched on the masculine virtues of gasoline vehicles that roar and thunder.
In the fall of 2022, Representative Majorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia who is closely allied with Mr. Trump, pushed the notion that gasoline cars are more macho at a rally. 'There's nothing more American than the roar of a V-8 engine under the hood of a Ford Mustang or Chevy Camaro, an incredible feel of all that horsepower.' But Democrats, she said, 'want to emasculate the way we drive.'
Elon Musk, Tesla's chief executive who has been working with the Trump administration, has tried to broaden the appeal of electric vehicles. His company's newest model is the Cybertruck, a massive pickup truck with lots of sharp angles.
'Musk has done everything he could to try to make a Tesla a manly vehicle,' said Virginia Scharff, an emeritus distinguished professor of history at the University of New Mexico and author of numerous books, including 'Taking the Wheel: Women and the Coming of the Motor Age.'
But, Ms. Scharff added, Mr. Musk may have gone too far. His alignment with Mr. Trump's conservative politics has alienated some of the most reliable buyers of electric cars — liberals and environmentalists who hope to move the world away from fossil fuels.
'Here's like the gender flip: Tesla is so associated with a kind of toxic masculinity now as opposed to the electric car being associated with femininity in the early part of the 20th century,' Ms. Scharff said.
Mr. Leno, the former 'Tonight Show' host, who now has an online show focused on cars, 'Jay Leno's Garage,' has a restored 1909 Baker Electric in his collection. It has a top speed of 25 miles per hour and can travel 80 miles on a full charge.
With a high-top cab decorated in Victorian flair, it has two fabric-cushioned bench seats facing each other and roller shades on the windows. The car was meant to accommodate fanciful women's hats, which at the turn of the century were often big and bold. As an added touch, the car's designers mounted a makeup case inside the car.
'What do men like?' Mr. Leno said. 'Something that rolls, explodes and makes noise. That's why men like the gasoline car, because it frightened children, you know, that type of thing.'
Mr. Leno said he loves the Baker, which he drives around Burbank at least once a year, to see holiday lights and decorations with his wife.
He said such vehicles had many merits, convenience among them. They are low maintenance, they're fast and you can fuel them at home, particularly at night when electricity is generally much more affordable than during the day.
The concept of home charging isn't new. Home car chargers also made their debut a century ago, only bulkier and a bit more frightful.
'It looked like a machine out of Dr. Frankenstein's laboratory,' said Leslie Kendall, chief historian at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.
Mr. Kendall said electric cars could have stuck around and even done well. But they were hampered by the lack of electricity in many communities, long charging times and their higher costs relative to gasoline vehicles — a Model T in 1908 cost about $650 compared with $1,750 for an electric roadster.
'You could carry extra gas with you,' he said. 'You couldn't carry extra electricity.'
Richard Riker, a grandson of an electric car pioneer, Andrew L. Riker, said his grandfather had identified one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the cars he designed and sold — one that lingers to this day.
'They didn't have charging stations out on the street corners like my grandfather said they need to,' Mr. Riker said.
During the Biden administration, Congress sought to address that shortcoming by allocating $7.5 billion for the construction of public chargers. Mr. Trump has halted that program.
One of Andrew Riker's cars from the mid-1890s, a topless, two-seater cab that still sputters along at about 15 m.p.h, is on display at the Petersen museum along with other electric vehicles, both from history and those under development.
Despite policy and other challenges, Mr. Riker said he was still optimistic about electric vehicles. He expects that in the coming decades, technical advances will give such vehicles a big edge over gasoline vehicles.
'If you can charge a car in five minutes and go 500 miles,' he said, 'the gasoline engine is history.'