Part of the problem I think was that each Doble car was basically a one-off. They were expensive, high performance prototypes, not production consumer products. In principle they could have been made more user friendly--in terms of performance specs they were really close to a win (15mpg, powerful, quiet, low water consumption, fast starting) but they were still finicky, high maintenance machines. Higher production numbers could have driven solutions, but the Otto cycle had the advantage there. I wonder if you ran the 1890-1930 experiment 10 times how differently it all might shake out each time.
The part almost no one talks about is how there are tons of cars being sold as early as 1880.
They were just called horseless carriages, and were essentially a small carriage with… an electric motor and batteries. Yup, the original dominant form of car was an EV.
