Electric vehicles are even older than the automobile industry. The first acknowledged EV was an electrified carriage introduced by Scottish inventor Robert Anderson in the 1830s.
By 1890, a Scottish chemist named William Morrison, who was living in Des Moines, applied for a patent for an EV that he’d developed. It had 24 battery cells, with a top speed of 20 mph, and was displayed at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
In the early 1900s, there were dozens of EVs under development, from race cars to delivery vehicles and private cars. Ransom E. Olds, the father of Oldsmobile, experimented with EVs, as did Ferdinand Porsche. Thomas Edison even tried his hand at an electric truck.
But when Henry Ford developed the gasoline powered Model T, its popularity essentially put EVs into the garage. There was some demand for them during World War II, when inabilities in finding fuel caused the military to look for other ways of powering vehicles. After the war, however, EVs turned back into curiosities.
There were lots of people who did not want to give up on them, including engineers at the Detroit car companies. EVs regularly showed up as concept vehicles in the 1960s and 1970s, and of course, the first lunar rover was powered by electricity. For the most part, they were considered experiments that were far too costly to put into mass production.