Early-1900s EVs were marketed to women because gas cars were too complicated

The notion of masculine and feminine is never far from the business of selling cars. Minivans have long been marketed to soccer moms, and off-road trucks geared toward men, even if they never venture off the pavement. But in the early 1900s, when electric vehicles (EVs) were comfortably outselling gasoline cars, the idealized driver was female. Why that is has everything to do with how we think about gender.

EVs were invented in the early 1830s. By the 1890s, American entrepreneurs were building fleets of them to replace horse-drawn carriages in major US cities. New York’s first electric cab arrived in 1897, and the following year Ferdinand Porsche built one of the world’s first hybrid electric vehicles, the P1, with a generator and electric motors in the wheel hubs.

Though a transformative time, the emergence of the personal vehicle was also chaotic. In the late 19th century, at least 1,500 manufacturers were building models that used electricity, gasoline, or even steam for propulsion, according to The Birth of Big Business in the United States, 1860-1914. No single technology dominated the market for years. An 1899 US Census recorded that total automobile production that year included 1,575 electric vehicles, 1,681 steam-powered, and 936 burning gasoline.

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Indeed, some of most successful EVs of the time were marketed as “a sitting room on wheels,” according to the Edison Tech Center. Dealerships were appointed as tea rooms, showcasing “the silent-running machines, with little clumps of foliage here and there, like oases in a desert, sheltering dainty tea tables, where the ladies—and their husbands, if they care to come along—will be taken care of while they are being told about the polished cars flitting about on the floor,” write Curtis and Judy Anderson in Electric and Hybrid Cars: A History. Even the founders of gasoline carmakers bought EVs for their wives. Ford’s wife Clara received a Detroit Electric in 1908, a few months before her husband’s Model T went on sale. For the next six years, a new battery-powered car was delivered to the Fords’ driveway every other year.


More: https://qz.com/1316554/early-1900s-evs-were-marketed-to-women-because-gas-cars-were-too-complicated/



Early 1900s Riker electric car (Smithsonian)