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.

Electric cabs in New York City in 1897. Credit: Photo courtesy Science Photo Library.

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.”

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.

An electric automobile charging during a tour from Seattle to Mount Rainier in 1919.Credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs.

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 favour of one technology.

A hundred years ago, politicians 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 per cent of their sales. The sponsor of the legislation later admitted that the incentive was excessive.

“We grabbed 27.5 per cent because we were not only hogs but the odd figure made it appear as though it was scientifically arrived at,” Texas Democratic Senator Tom Connally, 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 US 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 US economy. It also led to deadly urban air pollution and has been a major cause of climate change.

Now, the decadeslong 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.

The decadeslong tug of war between combustion engine and electric cars is intensifying again, and electric cars may be in trouble.

Sales of electric cars are growing quickly in most of the rest of world, increasing 35 per cent in China in the first four months of the year and 25 per cent in Europe, according to Rho Motion, a research firm. But in the United States, sales were up a more modest 11 per cent 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 $US7,500 federal tax credit. They also want to impose a new annual $US250 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. “EV momentum in the US has slowed, with policy uncertainty mounting,” analysts at Bernstein said in a note this month.

Jay Leno with a restored 1909 Baker Electric at a facility for his large automobile collection in Burbank, California.Credit: New York Times

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 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.”

A reproduction of an ad, left, for one America’s first electric vehicles, on the walls of Jay Leno’s collection.Credit: New York Times

Men, by contrast, have long been pitched on the masculine virtues of petrol cars that roar and thunder.

In autumn 2022, Republican representative for Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is closely allied with Trump, pushed the notion that petrol 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 CEO 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, Scharff added, Musk may have gone too far. His alignment with 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,” Scharff said.

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.

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 petrol vehicles — a Model T in 1908 cost about $US650 compared with $US1,750 for an electric roadster.

“You could carry extra gas with you,” he said. “You couldn’t carry extra electricity.”

Richard Riker, a grandson of 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,” Riker said

Despite policy and other challenges, 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 petrol vehicles.

“If you can charge a car in five minutes and go 500 miles,” he said, “the gasoline engine is history.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.