Electric Cars Are Almost 200 Years Old

Daniel asks whether electric cars are going to take over from gasoline cars. Mom asks him a more interesting question. Did he know electric cars were already competing with gasoline cars more than a hundred years ago? He did not. The earliest experimental electric carriages appeared in the 1830s. By around 1900, electric cars were serious competitors to gasoline cars in the United States -- quieter, easier to drive, free of exhaust on the street, and with no hand crank required to start. Clara Ford, Henry Ford's own wife, drove a Detroit Electric. Thomas Edison worked on improving electric car batteries. Electric taxis were running in New York and London. And then several things changed the competition. Gasoline cars became cheaper as manufacturing improved. In 1912 Charles Kettering developed a practical electric self-starter that Cadillac introduced -- and ironically, electrical technology had just removed gasoline's biggest disadvantage. Oil became cheap and widely available. Roads improved and people wanted to travel farther between cities, where limited range became a bigger problem for electric cars. Outside cities, access to electricity was still limited. All of those things together pushed electric cars out of the passenger-car market. By the 1930s electric passenger cars had almost disappeared. They never fully went away. Milk floats, golf carts, forklifts. And interest revived periodically. But the batteries were not good enough for the distances people expected. Then lithium-ion batteries began to change the equation -- and growing concern about what burning fossil fuels does to the atmosphere added urgency the 1900 version of the story did not have. Gasoline did not win because history held a contest and declared it the better technology. Price, infrastructure, fuel, roads, and new inventions all helped decide which direction the world went. What you will find in this episode: Why electric cars were serious competitors to gasoline cars around 1900 Why gasoline cars were genuinely difficult and dangerous to start How the Model T, the electric self-starter, and cheap oil changed the market Why range and infrastructure mattered as much as any single invention How better batteries helped bring electric cars back Daniel's closing line -- and Mom's response about what actually decided the outcome Surprising, historically rich, and the kind of episode that changes how you think about every electric car you see on the road. Listen, wonder, and learn. Find us @smilewithDaniel everywhere.