Most of the cabs on the streets of New York back in 1899 were electric, so why did they disappear? And why has it been so hard to bring them back?
In this episode, I am diving into the history of electric vehicles to reveal why a cleaner, quieter, and generally better technology got stamped out almost as quickly as it arrived.
This is part of our series, “Inventions That Changed the World”, and I think you’ll find it very eye-opening.
Kia ora, kaitiaki, and welcome to Now That's What I Call Green. I'm your host, Brianne West — an environmentalist and entrepreneur trying to get you as excited about our planet as I am. I'm all about creating a scientific approach to making the world a better place, without the judgement, and making it fun.
And of course, we will be chatting about some of the most amazing creatures we share our planet with. So, if you are looking to navigate through everything green — or not so green — you’ve come to the right place.
Someone killed the electric car. Twice. And now, air pollution from vehicles kills about 4.2 million people every single year — which is not far off the population of Aotearoa. Just gone. Every. Single. Year.
Kia ora koutou, I'm Brianne West, and welcome back to Now That's What I Call Green. Today, I’m being a detective — because I've always found this story fascinating. Why did the cleaner, quieter, generally better technology get stamped out almost as quickly as it arrived? Was it because of oil? Was it because of Detroit boardrooms? Was it suspicious patents? Was it skulduggery?
Well, let’s find out. Welcome to the history of the electric car — part of our series: Inventions That Changed the World.
Now bear with me — I’m about to get dramatic.
Picture this: It’s the winter of 1899, and you're in New York City, ankle-deep in slushy ice and wearing a horrible, scratchy woollen coat. The smog from all the fires is a pungent mix of coal smoke, horse manure, and something horrible that I don't want to name. Steam is coiling up from street gratings, mixing with that sharp, tangy smell of kerosene lamps.
It’s early morning. Everybody is rushing to and fro — some off to work, some dodging the horse-drawn carriages trotting up and down the muddy, rutted street. Then, like some kind of ghost, through the murk glides a dark green cab. There’s something different about it that you can’t quite place. There’s no clatter of hooves, no manure splatter — just this soft hum that’s almost polite amid the general noise and chaos of New York.
Passers-by stare, because the cab smells of nothing. And there are no horses pulling it. Somebody whispers that it must be magic before the driver tips his cap to you and silently slides on past.
How was that for poetic, huh? Maybe I should write that book I'm supposed to. Or maybe I should never do that again — let me know.
So EVs were actually developed almost simultaneously with internal combustion cars, way back in the late 19th century. Actually, cars go back quite a lot further than that — but that’s another podcast.
In fact, most of the cabs on the streets of New York back in 1899 were electric. They were produced by the rather boringly named Electric Vehicle Company — although they made up for it by calling the cars themselves “Electrobats,” which I think is adorable.
They were invented by two blokes from Philadelphia who patented the Electrobat in 1894, but then quickly went on to develop better and faster options. Obviously, “faster” is subjective — they achieved a top speed of about 32 kilometers an hour, and were capable of going a whole 40 Ks on a single charge. But, you know — you’ve got to start somewhere.
Now, the idea of electric vehicles gliding around New York City in the 1890s might sound like some kind of science fiction movie — but battery-powered cars weren’t just developed around the same time as internal combustion. They were more popular when cars started to become mainstream.
They were quiet, they didn’t create a lot of fumes or soot, and they were easy to drive. Because back then, internal combustion cars weren’t just noisy and smelly and gross — they were almost violent. Almost like Christine, if you're into Stephen King books.
To start the engine, you had to jam a steel crank into the radiator grille and turn it as fast as you could. If the engine kicked back — which happened, apparently, relatively frequently — the handle could not only break your wrist, but also your jaw. And of course, we didn’t have very good antibiotics or even painkillers back then.
Electric cars didn’t have that problem. You would hop in, twist a switch, and glide away — just like you do now.
In fact, The New York Times, in their wisdom, said that petrol cars required more strength to crank than most women possess, and pitched them as a woman’s car. I am a little bit surprised that they thought we should even drive back then.
So EVs were the preferred option. And they were better tech.
Why did they vanish for almost a century?
Three things came into play.
1. Cheap Texan oil.
Yee haw-haw! I can’t believe I just did that on a podcast. Please, somebody kill me.
On the 10th of January, 1901 — and probably the greatest day of someone’s life — a drilling rig near Beaumont, Texas hit pressurized crude oil so forcefully that the well spewed 100,000 barrels a day for nine days straight.
Newspapers called it The Lucas Gusher (charming), but investors called it a gold rush. Within a year, Gulf Coast wells were pumping 10 times the entire US output. The price of crude collapsed from about $2 a barrel to about 3 cents a barrel.
Put that in today’s money — about $122 down to just under $2 for a barrel. Imagine what $2 a barrel of oil would look like now.
Overnight, petrol shifted from something magical and rare to an everyday fuel. Suddenly, electric car owners were paying more for Edison’s nickel-iron batteries than their neighbours were paying for a year’s worth of petrol.
2. Petrol cars got easier to start.
Charles Kettering, an Ohio inventor, got fed up with whacking himself in the face with a crank. So he did something pretty obvious — in retrospect — and grafted an electric motor to a petrol engine’s flywheel.
If you're not a mechanic, don't worry. But effectively, he created the earliest starter motor. Cadillac loved it. They launched the device in their cars in 1912, and now everybody could start their car with a dashboard switch — no smashed jaw required.
That’s point two against the electric car.
3. Henry Ford.
You can't talk about cars without mentioning him. If you've never heard of him, he was a blatant anti-Semite who published a lot of awful things about Jewish people. Hitler loved him — which says a lot. He was anti-union (though that’s more complicated), and had a weirdly paternalistic approach to employee welfare.
Anyway, he obviously had an outsized impact on the world — particularly America and particularly cars. He founded Ford, doubled wages, normalized weekends, and, for the purpose of this episode, created the automated assembly line.
In 1913, at Ford’s Highland Park plant, the world’s first assembly line dragged the Model T chassis past rows of workers who each bolted on the same part, over and over.
That system took the time to make a car from 12 hours to just 93 minutes.
The price of a car fell from about $1,400 to $600. In today’s money: from $176,000 to $75,000. Less than half the cost of an electric car.
And that’s the third strike.
Suddenly, internal combustion cars were cheaper to buy, cheaper to run, and no longer a pain in the arse to start. Anybody could drive them. Even the girls.
I’ll continue with the next section in the following message.
Here’s Part 2 of your corrected transcript:
But of course, that’s not the whole story.
Behind the scenes, three particularly powerful players were quietly steering the electric car off the road.
First: The oil barons.
Rockefeller’s Standard Oil had stitched together the world’s biggest fuel empire (still around today). So every battery-powered mile was a loss to them. They sent their publicity men — precursors to today’s PR — to shout the virtues of modern liquid fuel, supposedly revolutionising the world. Some things never change. They’re just sneakier now.
Second: The tyre magnates.
Harvey Firestone (yes, of Firestone Tyres) knew that heavy petrol cars chewed rubber faster than light electric ones. That’s ironic, because electric cars weigh more now and it’s the other way around. But back then, his adverts framed endless petrol-powered road trips as the ultimate freedom. More kilometres = more tyres = more money.
Third: Thomas Edison.
A familiar name and a common villain — often considered a genius, but also a bit of a thief. Edison spent years chasing a lighter nickel-iron battery tech for his friend Henry Ford. But when petrol prices collapsed and chemistry lagged behind, he gave up. Was it physics? Was it profit prediction? We’ll never know.
But Standard Oil kept fuel cheap. Firestone kept tyres spinning. Edison disappeared. And electric cars lost their celebrity champion.
Coincidence… or corporate conspiracy? Doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo. We'll never know.
Now let’s take a huge leap forward to 1990.
The world had kind of started to pay attention to the scientists gently warning us about climate change for decades. LA smog alerts were routine. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to LA, but breathing is fun.
California regulators finally decided enough was enough. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) unveiled the Zero Emission Vehicle Mandate, declaring that by 1998, 2% of every large carmaker’s sales in the state must produce zero exhaust fumes — rising to 10% by 2003.
GM rose to the occasion with their model: the EV1.
And the electric car was back.
Except… just kidding. No, it wasn’t.
The EV1 was a beautiful two-seat coupe launched in 1996, powered by a lead-acid battery — super old-school tech — and had a range of about 120 km per charge. Pretty crap, but still better than the 1890s.
In 1999, an upgrade brought in nickel-metal hydride cells. That range stretched to 230 km. Better… but still not great.
0–100 took 8 seconds, which was apparently quick for the time. Though Ferrari was doing it in 4.4 seconds, so it wasn’t exactly impressive. What was good, though, was that recharging it overnight cost just a few dollars.
But for some bizarre reason, GM didn’t sell the car. They leased it — $650 a month in today’s money. Fewer than 1,200 vehicles ever hit the road.
But people loved it. They loved the way it drove, loved the cost, thought it was cute.
Then in early 2003, GM said “Nope. We're done.” They cancelled the EV1, recalled every leased vehicle, and crushed most of them.
Why?
They gave three reasons. But pay attention to the third one.
It wasn’t profitable. Leasing-only was a loss-making exercise. Compared to SUVs with better margins, it was a no-brainer to stop.
Batteries were hard to source. Patents caused issues. Business is hard, I get it — but for such a massive industrial giant, that seems… solvable.
Lobbying.
Oh yes. Lobbying.
The oil and motor industries challenged CARB’s mandate in court. Of course they did. By 2003, the requirement was watered down — and with it, the only real reason to keep building electric cars.
People were furious. Lessees protested. And the 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car turned the EV1 into a symbol of lost potential and corporate conspiracy.
By 2005, the last EV1 sat gutted in a museum.
Would we ever have an electric car again? Or were we doomed to choke on petrol fumes until we boiled the planet?
Then came 2008.
A small company in Silicon Valley unveiled something exciting. You’ll know the name: Tesla.
Tesla was an unknown startup in California. They bolted 6,500 laptop batteries (yes, really) into a lightweight sports car chassis and called it the Tesla Roadster. It was sporty. Zippy. It could go from Auckland to Taupō.
It had a catch: it cost about $140,000. But the point wasn’t volume — it was proof. And style.
Reporters drove it. Loved it. Grinned like idiots. Headlines exploded. Big car companies took notice.
But here’s the problem: the car kind of sucked.
Sure, it could smoke a Porsche. But the cabin rattled. Components blew up every few thousand kilometres. The battery overheated constantly. Early owners became unpaid test pilots — a running joke.
To their credit, Tesla replaced drive units, upgraded cooling, and quietly bought back some lemons. But every fix bled cash they didn’t have.
Then came the man now most associated with the company: Elon Musk.
South African-born, PayPal-rich, ambition-fuelled. By late 2008, he was essentially holding Tesla up with his own cash. They were broke. Suppliers were angry. Staff couldn’t be paid.
Musk wired in his last dollars and got a $650 million low-interest loan from the US Department of Energy.
And it paid off.
In 2012, Tesla launched the Model S. It had:
A bigger battery
Four doors
Loads of boot space
New lithium-ion battery tech — a third the cost of the Roadster, more range, more power
Reviewers stopped laughing. They started taking it seriously.
They solved the chicken-and-egg charger problem by building their own high-speed network.
As an aside: this ability to move fast is why companies create change better than governments with five-year review cycles.
Elon is our third villain — although maybe not at this point. I used to adore him. I genuinely thought he was saving the planet and making it cool at the same time. Yeah, I know. My people judgment is terrible.
But let’s give him credit. Without Tesla, would we have electric cars like we do now?
He wasn’t technically a founder. He annoyed a lot of people. But he pushed the company forward. He influenced the industry.
I actually bought a Model S the day after I sold Ethique. It was a brilliant day. I’d wanted one for years. It was equally brilliant… and rubbish.
Ludicrous Mode was everything I hoped — made me feel sick, but wow, it was awesome. But it went back to the dealer four times in the first few weeks. Weird issues — door handles not working, windows going down and not back up, it rattled.
So yeah. Weird.
I sold it a few years ago when I started seeing the writing on the wall. My new EV uses batteries free from slave-mined rare minerals. Big fan of BMW’s policies. More on that later.
But no denying: Tesla changed the industry. We’re even having this conversation because of them.
More coming in the final section next message.
Here’s the final section (Part 3) of your polished transcript:
So, where are we now?
Well, BYD (or B-Y-D) sold more battery cars last year than Tesla.
There are more Chinese brands than you've probably ever heard of — GAC Aeon, Leapmotor — and they're smashing export records.
Every legacy carmaker has promised an all-electric lineup. They're panicked about margins, timelines, tech. But they all know the writing is on the wall.
And if you ignore the yo-yo media headlines, global EV sales keep rising. 24% of new cars worldwide were pure battery in the first quarter of this year — up from 1% a decade ago. Just ten years.
In Aotearoa, 12% of our cars are electric.
And yet — despite all that, and the fascinating headlines, and the exciting tech, and the fact that EVs are just… better cars — people still hate them.
Why?
The electric car conversation is — forgive me — charged. People take it weirdly personally. My parents used to have a Leaf, and people drove aggressively around them. I promise you, neither of them drives slowly.
I noticed the same when I drove my Tesla — although the BMW is less obviously EV, so that helps.
People also park weirdly — like blocking EV chargers just to be a twat. I cannot fathom why. Why does it bother them that people drive a different type of car?
Maybe it's the history we've just covered. Or the myths people believe about EVs. Or — and hear me out — maybe it’s a deeply seated inferiority complex. Because deep down, they know they’re driving old tech powered by old dinosaurs, and even the smallest, most grandma-ish EV will outperform them.
So let’s bust some myths to wrap this up.
Myth #1: EVs are worse for the environment because of the battery.
Wrong. So say LCAs — lifecycle analyses that look at everything from birth to death.
Yes, building an EV creates more emissions up front — mainly because the battery is energy-intensive. But as we get better at recycling batteries, that’s improving too.
Once a car leaves the factory, that flips. Petrol cars keep burning fuel. EVs? Much less.
In rich countries, the crossover point — when EVs become cleaner overall — is around 25,000 km. That’s two years of average driving. In Aotearoa, thanks to our clean energy mix, it’s more like 12,000 km.
After that? Every kilometre in the EV produces less carbon. And that gap keeps widening.
This is true for almost every country — even coal-heavy ones like Poland or India. The break-even point takes longer, but it’s still reached.
And yes — EVs aren’t perfect. But “not perfect” doesn’t mean “not worth it.” That’s a silly way to look at sustainability.
EVs are better. Full stop.
Myth #2: EVs catch fire.
Thermal runaway is dramatic — and rare.
Petrol cars catch fire at a rate of about 3 per 1,000. EVs? Around 0.3 per 1,000. So a third of one. Yes, EV fires are harder to put out — firefighters often have to just let them burn — but they happen way less often.
Most of the flaming ones you see were from first-gen designs years ago.
Myth #3: The grid can’t cope.
Calm down.
If every single car, ute and SUV in Aotearoa magically became electric overnight (which it won’t), we’d need about 20% more electricity per year — around 8–9 terawatt hours.
That sounds like a lot. But since most charging happens overnight, peak load would only rise by about 5–7% — which is what already happens on the first frosty morning every winter.
Also, cars last 15+ years. So this change phases in over a decade, giving generators time to finish the wind, solar and geothermal projects already underway.
Electrifying heavy industry is actually the bigger challenge — things like swapping coal boilers at dairy plants for renewable electricity will add almost as much load as the entire car fleet.
Myth #4: EVs use slave labour.
Yes, some do. And that is despicable and unacceptable.
Cobalt mining in places like Congo is grim, and it's real. But there’s progress. Companies are:
Developing new chemistries (like lithium iron phosphate) that don’t use cobalt or nickel
Scaling up battery recycling — plants in the US, Europe and China are pulling more than 90% of metals from dead batteries
Switching supply chains to verified ethical sources
BMW, BYD, Tesla — they’re all using better tech. So yes, Mr “EVs Suck” in the comments — you can recycle EV batteries. And they are improving the supply chains.
And finally… the lungs of schoolchildren.
Weird way to start a sentence, I know.
But when school bus fleets go electric, roadside nitrogen oxides and particulates drop by about 30% within six months.
That means fewer asthma attacks. Fewer heart attacks later. Cleaner air.
If you listened to the nuclear mini-series, you’ll know: 8 million people die every year from fossil fuel particulates. So this is no small thing.
That’s it for today’s episode.
I thought it was fascinating — I hope you did too.
I had to skip over some history and tech to keep this brief, and I’ve got to admit: I’ve never really cared about electricity. Couldn’t care less whether electrons are a wave or a particle or both.
(How can you be both?? I’m not smart enough for that.)
If you want more, the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car is apparently excellent. I haven’t seen it, which I probably should have — would’ve been great homework.
But I hope this episode gave you a bit of ammo — for the next time someone driving a Ford Ranger gives you grief about your EV.
Coming up next:
The first episode in the Micro Green series is out later this week. I did promise it last week (or the week before), but Incrediballs — the drink startup I’m working on — has been a bit hectic.
This week’s episode will be about the guy who f***ed up the planet. Twice. Lovely guy. Really interesting.
Kaitiaki, I’ll see you next time. And there you go — I hope you learned something and realised that being green isn’t about having everything in your pantry matching in silly glass jars or living in a commune.
(If that’s your jam — fabulous.)
But sustainability, at its heart, is just using what you need.
If you enjoyed this episode, please don’t keep it to yourself. Drop me a rating and hit that subscribe button.
Kia ora, and I’ll see you next week.
