First electric road vehicle

The first electric road vehicle was built by French inventor Gustave Trouvé in 1880–81. It was a British-made Coventry pedal-powered tricycle that Trouvé fitted with lead-acid batteries and a Siemens electric motor. The top speed was about 3 mph (4.8 km/h) and it ran only once or twice down the Rue Valois in central Paris in April 1881. Satisified with his experiment, Trouvé removed the electric motor and battery for use in his experiments with outboard motors in boats.

Although often described as the "first electric car", Trouvé's invention (like Carl Benz's "patent Motorwagen" of 1885) wasn't quite what we'd recgonize as a car today. Both were three-wheeled, with a tiller-style steering mechanism on the single front wheel. In Benz's motorwagen, the driver rode in a bench seat on top of the vehicle (like a coachman) while Trouvé's had more in common with a modern recumbent bike.

The invention of the electric car is sometimes credited to British inventor Robert Davidson, who demonstrated an electric locomotive in 1837. However, this extremely heavy vehicle could only run on rails.