Electric cars were once marketed as ‘women’s cars’. Did this hold back their development over the next century?

It was not a given that petrol-powered cars would come to dominate the world. In fact, back in 1900, just 22% of cars produced in the US were powered by gasoline (also known as petrol, benzine or various other names). The rest split between electric and steam cars.

There is no consensus on what explains the success of the petrol car and the historical demise of the electric. Some zoom in on the technical inferiority of electric cars, even though they had an average range of about 90 miles (135 kilometres) in the 1910s and eventually became cheaper to drive.

Others, including my colleague Hana Nielsen and I, argue that technological limitations could have been counteracted if electricity grids and charging station infrastructure had been rolled out in the early years of the 20th century.