The answer might surprise you. The first electric car was made before the first petrol-powered car, nearly 200 years ago! It had a top speed of 4 mph and a range of 1.5 miles.
Half-a-century later (in the 1890s) the state-of-the-art electric car had 4WD, zoomed along at 20 mph, and had a range of 50 miles...thanks to 24 batteries weighing more than half-a-ton.
Electricity has always been a potentially better source of power than petrol.
The problem has always been, and still is, how best to “store” electrical potential in a moving vehicle. What has held it back, and what could finally drive it forward, is the technology of batteries. Even today they are heavy. They are bulky. They are expensive. Their discharge range is limited.
Recharging takes a lot longer than refuelling. In almost every other respect, electric motors are winners over internal combustion engines – in production cost, size, weight, fewer moving parts, rev range (one gear can manage all road speeds), acceleration, quietness, less toxic emission...
Those benefits can be readily harnessed for in-city buses on prescribed routes; but not for cars that want to go anywhere and everywhere.
None of the problems or advantages is new. But as soon as internal combustion using fossil fuels was invented and sufficiently mastered (a little more than 100 years ago) it has been the preferred - and utterly dominant - choice for motoring, because it had much longer range, and quite soon went a lot faster.
It was not, immediately, more convenient. It needed quite elaborate service every day, fuel had to be purchased in four-gallon cans from chemist shops, it was hard to drive, noisy, smelly and expensive.
But technology improved and mass production (especially the Model T) halved the price and sales boomed. Infrastructure (like pipelines, tankers and petrol stations) became a big business opportunity and followed suit. For convenience, performance and all-round versatility electric alternatives were left in the dust (and there was plenty of that).
Even today, if you carry the same weight of petrol as the weight of an EV’s battery banks, you can travel 10 times as far...on the grid or off it.
