Shaping Electric Vehicle Perceptions
The Historical Normalization of Internal Combustion Automobility
Keywords:
Path dependence, Technology lock-in, Automobility, Electric vehicles, Historical narratives, Innovation resistanceAbstract
Electric vehicles are widely presented today as a new solution to the environmental costs of internal combustion engine (ICE) – a clean alternative challenging a technology that has dominated private mobility for more than a century. Over this period, the characteristics of the ICE have become so deeply embedded in public understanding that they now define, for most people, what a car simply is. Yet this perception obscures an earlier history. At the turn of the twentieth century, steam, electric, and internal combustion vehicles competed directly for the emerging private mobility market, and electric vehicles were not a marginal technology. By 1900, they accounted for nearly one-third of American automobiles and, in several respects, offered advantages over their rivals. This paper takes that overlooked technological contest as its starting point and argues that the subsequent dominance of ICE vehicles cannot be adequately explained as a straightforward market outcome in which the most efficient or practical technology prevailed. Instead, it contends that ICE dominance was substantially the product of path dependence. Contingent historical events, patent litigation, corporate financial collapse, and industrial-political manoeuvring locked in a technological trajectory that was not preordained by cost or performance alone. Once established, this trajectory was reinforced over successive decades into a deep cultural and psychological normalization, through which ICE characteristics became embedded markers of identity, status, and masculinity. Consequently, when electric vehicles re-emerged in the late twentieth century as a climate-policy priority, they appeared as a historical anomaly rather than the revival of an earlier competing technology, generating resistance from both industry and consumers. The paper concludes that economic incentives can move price-sensitive consumers but are structurally insufficient alone: sustained EV adoption requires policy that addresses the non-economic, identity-based residue of this history.
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