Electric cars ruled the roads once before, until the electric starter killed them
Around 1900 electricity was a favoured way to power a car: quiet, clean and free of crank handles. Electric cabs carried London's first motorised fares, and in 1899 an electric car became the first to beat 100 km/h. Then, in 1912, an electric starter motor made petrol cars easy to start, and electrics faded.
Robert Anderson is often credited with building the first electric car sometime in the 1830s. Experiments multiplied in the 1880s, and Andreas Flocken's 1888 Elektrowagen is regarded as the first true example. Before 1900 the land speed record changed hands among six electric machines, the final one Camille Jenatzy's rocket-shaped La Jamais Contente at 105.88 km/h. The fleet peaked at around 30,000 vehicles before faster refuelling and cheaper production swung buyers to combustion engines.
The modern comeback was slow. California regulators pushed carmakers toward zero-emission models in the early 1990s, but those cars were withdrawn. Tesla's Roadster, delivered from 2008, was the first highway-legal electric car on lithium-ion cells and the first production electric car to exceed 320 km per charge. Mitsubishi's i-MiEV and then the Nissan Leaf brought mass production, and the Tesla Model 3 became the first electric car to pass a million sales, in June 2021.
The heart of the car, the battery, has become far cheaper, falling from €605 per kilowatt-hour in 2010 to €100 in 2019. Owners typically save around half on maintenance thanks to fewer moving parts, and warranties commonly cover batteries for 8 years or 100,000 miles. Replacement is rare but costly, typically between $5,000 and $16,000. Combustion engines, by comparison, lose about two thirds of their energy as heat.
Over a full life cycle, battery cars generally produce far fewer greenhouse emissions, even though building the battery costs more carbon up front; one European Union assessment put the saving at 73 percent against petrol cars. The break-even point ranged from roughly 17,000 to 70,000 km across studies. In 2025, 21 million plug-in cars were sold worldwide, over a quarter of all new cars.
Source: Electric car
