When Labor announced its plan to boost the number of electric cars in Australia over the next decade, an election campaign battleground opened up.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison accused his rival of wanting to "end the weekend when it comes to his policy on electric vehicles"; Bill Shorten returned fire by accusing the Government of running a "scare campaign".

But electric cars aren't new — they've been around for more than a century.

And for a moment at the advent of the automobile industry, they even threatened to become the dominant mode of transport.

Inventing electric

From the late 19th century, electric cars began to trickle onto the streets of major American cities, representing a formidable part of the automobile trade.

A carriage could now be transported by electricity instead of horse — the culmination of centuries of technological innovation and invention.

Photo: In the early 20th century advertisers were busy targeting prospective electric car buyers. (Getty: Stock Montage)

The electric car soon became the favoured method of personal transportation, well and truly surpassing its underdeveloped, gas-guzzling counterpart.

"In 1901, 38 per cent of the cars were electric, and 20 per cent or so were petrol, and in the middle, there was the outgoing technology of steam," says technologist and historian David Kirsch.

"If you'd asked the great experts of their age in 1900 which technology would come to dominate the motor-based transportation, I think most learned people would have said electricity."

But history would prove them wrong. Advances in internal combustion engines in the first decade of the 20th century lessened the relative advantages of the electric car.