Just as a disillusioned Pope was contemplating bankruptcy, another American company, the Baker Motor Vehicle Company, in Cleveland, Ohio, was claiming to be the world’s biggest manufacturer of electric cars. Founded by Walter C. Baker in 1899, with money from two businessmen who had made their fortunes selling sewing machines, the first Baker Runabout was

It was a very different story in America, where electric cars kept pace with the internal combustion competition until Ford’s game-changing Model T arrived. Why was this? The greater urbanization of American cities made getting about in an electric car far easier and the electric car industry made a more determined effort to create a

The decade from 1900 to 1910 represented the Golden Age of electric cars. In the first year of the new century, nearly 40 per cent of the cars sold in the United States, the world’s largest market, were electric. Gasoline-powered cars accounted for just 22 per cent. Although development of the internal combustion engine was

The EVC wasn’t slow to put its grand plan into effect. Hartford was soon working on orders for thousands of electric vehicles and the company was expanding abroad. To satisfy demand in Paris, the EVC built a charging station at 54 Avenue Montaigne, in the centre of the city, and acquired land for a second

The EVC continued its remorseless policy of consolidation. Before the end of the year the Riker Electric Motor Vehicle Company, of New Jersey, had been bought out. Andrew Lawrence Riker had lashed together his first electric car by cannibalizing two Remington bicycle frames in 1894 with a metal cradle and a motor. Two years later,

The early success of electric cabs in America brought Morris and Salom’s invention to the attention of Isaac Leopold Rice, president of the Electric Storage Battery Company, of Philadelphia. Rice, a brilliant lawyer who had made his name saving ailing railroad companies from financial ruin, had snapped up many of the most promising patents on

Walter Bersey, a precocious 20-year-old who had designed his own dry battery, was the first businessman to introduce a ‘self-propelled’ vehicle for hire on the streets of London. His early cabs resembled horseless carriages with twin 3.5bhp Lundell-type motors, a two-speed gearbox (with clutch) and chain final drive. They were capable of a steady 9mph

Although electric cars were popular with wealthy private individuals, as the twentieth century dawned they enjoyed their greatest sales success as electric cabs. Electric ‘horseless carriages’ plied for trade in major cities across the world – and America in particular. For a time, their advantages of smooth running, reliability and simplicity appeared to be a