The Fascinating and Complex History of Electric Cars

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When you hear electric vehicles (EVs) what do you think? Tesla? Elon Musk? What if we were to ask how far these cars go? You would be surprised to know that EVs actually date all the way back to 1828.

The history of EVs is not only long it's also complex. Today, there is a dispute at what point the vehicles were even born.

For the purpose of this video, we take 1828 as our starting point when the first electric car was made only as a prototype. That's precisely why many skip that point in history and go straight to 1834 or 1835 as the year the first EVs were made.

That's the year an American called Thomas Davenport built a small locomotive that was powered by two electromagnets and ran on a track. That decade then saw several other inventors tackle electric cars until in 1990 EVs made up about a third of all cars manufactured in the United States.

Sadly, by the 1920s electric cars would stop being commercially viable. Why? And what happened next for EVs? We answer all these questions and more about the fascinating history of electric cars.