In the winter of 1973-1974, gasoline was so scarce that American truckers short of fuel blocked highways in protest and in Europe the horse and cart returned to some city streets.
Such was the squeeze on consumers that one New Jersey woman warned that “the people are on the verge of revolting.”
An American father and son warn off potential gasoline thieves in April 1974.
The cause was an oil embargo imposed by several Middle Eastern petro-states targeting Western countries that were supporting Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
The solution, it seemed, was to urgently develop electric vehicles (EVs) that could run without the gasoline that had quadrupled in price in the space of a few months.
Russian engineer Hippolyte Romanov demonstrates an electric carriage of his own invention outside Gatchina Palace, near St. Petersburg, in the early 1900s.
Electric cars were not a new concept in the 1970s. At the beginning of the 20th century, around one-third of vehicles driving on American roads were battery-powered.
The first generation of electric vehicles were easy to start and quieter and cleaner than their steam- and gasoline-powered counterparts. But early EVs were expensive to produce and, critically, limited in range.
A Detroit Electric on a road in front of Washington’s Mount Rainer in 1919. The popular early EV had a range of 130 kilometers on a full charge but was a notoriously slow mover.
As the gasoline engine evolved past the cumbersome crank-handle era, and networks of new roads beckoned drivers to go on long-distance adventures in the early 1900s, the gasoline-powered car began to pull ahead as the favored consumer choice.
When automotive producer Henry Ford opted for a gasoline motor in his revolutionary Model T, electric and steam-powered cars were left behind.
For the next 50 years, the EV remained a largely obsolete technology.
A crowd gathers around a CitiCar in February 1974 in an unspecified American city. The 600-kilogram vehicle began to be produced that year as the oil crisis peaked. A total of 4,444 units of the car were made before it was phased out in 1977.
In 1973, Arab oil-producing countries launched an export embargo in response to U.S. support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The subsequent energy crisis sparked a burst of development that led, briefly, to the return of the EV in 1974.
Several photographs held in U.S. and Russian archives and reproduced in this gallery demonstrate the year battery-powered vehicles zipped unexpectedly back into view.
A man preparing to charge his EV at an unidentified location in the United States in February 1974.
An electric car proponent explained the return of the EV to a U.S. journalist in April 1974:
“The energy crisis has turned on the electric vehicle...” he said. “People realize there is not an unlimited supply of oil, and they are going to stay scared.”
An ET-800 Electra minibus prototype on display in Moscow in January 1974. The Soviet Estonian-made hybrid was molded from lightweight fiberglass panels and could reach a reported top speed of 60 kilometers per hour on its electric engine before a gasoline motor kicked in.
The U.S.S.R. openly supported the 1973 Arab war on Israel, and the Soviet economy was relatively unscathed by the “oil shock.” But as Western countries raced to develop EVs, the future of transport looked increasingly likely to be electric.
In April 1974, the Kremlin’s automotive ministry decreed that electric vehicle development was a priority.
A Soviet-made electric vehicle prototype being charged in Moscow in February 1974.
Pavel Bludenov, a Dubai-based Russian automotive journalist, says that the Soviet Union was in some ways well-placed to push the development of electric vehicles in the 1970s.
“The big difference between Western and Soviet cars (electric or gasoline),” he says, was that the U.S.S.R.’s engineers “didn’t need to think about efficiency and commercial profitability.”
Soviet test-drivers plug in an “electromobile” based on the chassis of an UAZ truck in 1974.
Unlike Western engineers who needed to tick every conceivable box to appeal to the free market, their Soviet counterparts had only to impress a small panel of bureaucrats for success.
But although several Soviet prototype EVs were rolled out amid the 1970s oil crisis, none ended up being approved for mass production.
The NIIAT-A923, a Soviet-made electric delivery van prototype photographed in 1974. The design ended up being vastly overweight and riddled with technical flaws that were hard to overcome with the battery technology of the time.
Bludenov says Soviet engineers soon arrived at “the same problems as electric vehicles in other countries: The technology didn't allow for these models to be accessible and practical.”
Engineers of the 1970s were hitting the roadblocks their predecessors had faced 50 years before when designing EVs: short driving ranges, high production costs, and the hefty weight of batteries. Electricity was so stringently allocated that at least one Soviet EV had its own autonomous combustion engine to fuel its heating system.
Electric delivery van prototypes in Moscow in April 1975
In March 1974, Arab governments ended the oil embargo that had shaken up the world and prices soon fell. Although further oil shocks would come in the 1970s, electric car production returned to being a tiny niche industry.
It had become clear that battery technology simply hadn't come far enough in the previous half century to avoid the original pitfalls of electric vehicles.
The battery tray on a Soviet-made electric delivery vehicle
It would take the groundbreaking development of powerful and comparatively lightweight lithium-ion batteries to convince engineers, including tech billionaire Elon Musk, to once more explore the possibility of powering cars with electricity.
An electric van being tested in Moscow in September 1975.
The first lithium-ion battery was introduced in 1991, the same year the Soviet Union collapsed. Automotive manufacturers in Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union were focused on survival at the time rather than expensive innovation.
An electric Lada Vaz-2801 seen in January 1984. A prototype of the EV was first made in 1975 and a total of 47 vehicles were produced.
Bludenov says it is still possible to find traces of the development burst of Soviet-made EVs half a century ago.
While visiting the Rostselmash agricultural equipment plant in Rostov-on-Don in 2021, he says, "I was surprised to see Soviet-era technical trucks running on electric power there! They are still in operation."