The future lies with electric vehicles

Carl Benz may have been the first person successfully to marry the horseless carriage with the ICE. But early dalliances with batteries predate him. As early as the 1830s Robert Anderson, a Scot, developed a rudimentary EV, but it was not a success. Even after the car industry really took off in the 1890s, as French and American firms joined the fray, electric power was still in the ascendancy. In America in 1900, almost twice as many electric- as petrol-driven vehicles were on the road. Then the Ford Model T, cheaply made by mass production, a growing oil industry and a wider availability of petrol sealed the fate of battery power.