When Electric Cars Were for Women

If you think the current chaos in the EV market—non-standard chargers, range anxiety, and massive corporate pivots—is a new phenomenon, you haven't been paying attention to history. We’ve been here before. Over a century ago, the streets were a wild west of competing energy sources. In 1898, the U.S. had maybe 50 carmakers. A decade later, that number exploded by 500%. We were building the future in real-time, and no one knew if the winner would be powered by steam, gasoline, or electricity.

The Original Format War

Building in a vacuum is easy; building in a fragmented market is hell. In the early 1900s, steam was the legacy player, riding the coattails of locomotive success. But steam cars were essentially mobile boilers—hot, heavy, and prone to catching fire. Gasoline was the gritty upstart, but it was a nightmare for the average user. Before the electric starter arrived in 1911, you had to hand-crank those engines, which was a great way to break an arm. They were loud, they smelled like a refinery, and they were generally antisocial.

Then there was the electric vehicle (EV). It was clean, quiet, and started with a simple switch. Because the experience was so refined, the industry made a strategic choice: they marketed EVs to women and doctors. For women, it was about independence without the grease; for doctors, it was about making house calls at 2:00 AM without waking up the entire neighborhood. It was the original "lifestyle" tech play.

The Founder’s Pivot: From Sleighs to Circuits

Take the story of Samuel Robinson Bailey. He was a carriage maker who saw the writing on the wall. By 1906, the carriage industry was dying. Bailey didn't just sit there and wait for the end; he pivoted his entire manufacturing operation in Amesbury, Massachusetts, to electric vehicles. His 1908 Bailey Victoria Phaeton was a beautiful piece of engineering, but it was priced at $2,000—roughly $73,000 in today’s money. This wasn't a mass-market play; it was a high-end luxury product for early adopters like Fannie Goodnow, a Boston socialite who was plugging in her car when most people were still cleaning up horse manure.

The Edison Failure

Even the biggest names in tech aren't immune to overpromising and underdelivering. Thomas Edison, arguably the most famous founder of the era, spent years trying to build a better battery. He announced a breakthrough in 1903 with massive hype, but the reality was a disaster. The batteries leaked and couldn't hold a charge. Edison had to go back to the drawing board for years.

For builders, this is the ultimate cautionary tale. While Edison was perfecting his chemistry, his friend Henry Ford was perfecting the assembly line for the Model T. By the time Edison finally shipped a reliable alkaline battery in 1910, the internal combustion engine had already secured the network effect. The infrastructure was leaning toward gas, and the window for EVs was slamming shut.

The Charging Nightmare

If you’ve ever searched for a Tesla Supercharger while holding a CCS adapter, you’d recognize Fannie Goodnow’s barn. To charge her Bailey Victoria, she used a mercury-arc rectifier—a glowing glass tube filled with mercury vapor that converted AC power from the grid into the DC needed for her lead-acid batteries. It took 12 hours to get a full charge.

But the real kicker was the lack of standards. Every manufacturer had their own idea of what a plug should look like. The Electric Vehicle Association of America tried to standardize things in 1910, but early adopters still had to carry a trunk full of adapters and cables just to travel between cities. We are literally repeating the same mistakes 115 years later. The lack of a unified charging standard in the early 20th century was one of the primary friction points that killed the first EV wave.

The Founder’s Perspective

What can we learn from the fall of S.R. Bailey & Co.? They only produced about 600 cars before selling the factory in 1915. They had the right idea, but they were fighting a war on too many fronts. They were reliant on third-party battery tech that failed them (Edison), they were fighting a lack of charging infrastructure, and they were being undercut by a competitor (Ford) who understood that scale beats elegance every single time.

For those of us building in AI or crypto today, the parallels are uncomfortable. We have a lot of "mercury-arc rectifiers" right now—clunky, experimental tech that works but isn't ready for the masses. We have a lot of founders making lifestyle products for a niche audience while the "Model T" of our industry is being built elsewhere.

The lesson here isn't that electric power was a bad idea. It was a great idea that lacked a viable ecosystem.

Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum. You can have the cleanest, quietest, most sophisticated product on the market, but if the user has to spend 12 hours charging it with a proprietary plug while the competitor is selling a cheaper, louder alternative that can be refueled anywhere, you lose. Bailey lost. Edison moved on. And it took a century for the market to circle back to where Fannie Goodnow started in her barn in Massachusetts.

The Takeaway for Builders

Don't just build the car; look at the grid. If your product requires the user to be a hero—carrying adapters, waiting 12 hours, or paying a 300% premium—you aren't building a mass-market solution; you're building a hobby for the elite. The winner of the next tech cycle won't just be the one with the best tech; it will be the one who makes the tech invisible. The internal combustion engine didn't win because it was better; it won because it was easier to live with. As builders, we should be obsessed with reducing that friction above all else.

Read the original at IEEE Spectrum →