In the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, tucked in among the many internal-combustion automobiles that virtually defined the 20th century as the era of fossil fuels, is a small cadre of electric vehicles. Not the experimental designs from the 1980s, the early prototypes of the 1990s, the functional models of the 2000s, or the elegant Teslas of the 2010s, but electric vehicles designed and built more than a century ago. By 1900 more than 30,000 were registered in the U.S., and they stood poised to replace the horse and buggy as the primary means of vehicular transportation in the world’s biggest cities....