I just came across electric cars being built as early as 1893. They were also preferred to gas cars since they were more silent. Their range was a problem since they couldn't travel far. But they were more liked that gasoline cars as those cars had their own problems. Why didn't they go into mass production and overcome their initial hurdles of development as compared to gas cars.
Electric cars did have advantages over internal-combustion ones, circa 1900. They did not have to be manually started ( which was a great barrier to many people driving especially women, as it required some strength, and a willingness to risk the injury of a broken arm if the engine kicked back), electric motors accelerated and slowed more smoothly, without the need for as much shifting of gears, and working a clutch. And the early gas engines were not nearly as trouble-free as later ones. It would not be unusual to grind the valves every month or so. Electric cars in some ways were easier maintenance.
There were a few notable disadvantages. A gallon of gasoline has about 36 kilowatt hours of energy in it ( an engine doesn't use all of it for work, of course, but it's there). If you consider the early electric car, with 60 volts available in its batteries, that is 650 amp hours. When you consider that a 12mm copper cable is good for conducting about half that, you can imagine that "refueling" the electric car would take much more time than refueling the gasoline car. This was also before the modern pulse-width motor controls, that are pretty energy efficient: the power controls on the early electric were limited to an extra set of field windings in the motor for greater torque at start; and a variable resistor or rheostat: which would just convert unwanted electricity to heat.
There was also not nearly as much of an electrical grid- mostly, they were in cities- and sources of electricity were varied, when you got out into the country. When Oliver Fritchle ran his electric car cross-country from Lincoln NE to New York City in 1908, he had enough equipment and knew enough to be able to adapt to whatever current was on offer wherever he stopped, whether AC or DC: but he admitted that not everyone was an electrical engineer. Mostly, therefore, electric vehicles were thought appropriate for urban areas- with short distances and the ability to be easily re-charged. Electric vehicles were thought ideal for urban trucks, which would have a limited number of hours every day that they would be running, and could re-charge overnight.
There's a tendency for people writing about the history of inventions to emphasize advancing technology as the reason for business success: the better design is supposed to win by virtue of being more advanced. This is sometimes true, but there are many cases where a design succeeds for other reasons. Many inventions fail because there's no need for them yet, or a design gets more market share than another because of business strategy. Here, we can say there were a decent number of advantages to an electric car over the gas-powered one, and they might well have survived in niches like urban daily commuting and transport, where they were practical. And they would have been as easy to manufacture as any other car. However, the electric vehicle came up against one of the major manufacturing phenomena of the 20th c., the Model T Ford. In 1908, when it ran in his cross-country race, one of Fritchle's electric cars cost $2,000. But Ford's brand-new Model T was $650. After some years of increasing economies of scale production, Ford dropped the price to $500. The mass popularity of the Ford also brought with it a growing infrastructure to support it: gas stations, mechanics familiar with the engines, dealers across the century who had parts. It was also a very accessible design, so there thousands of owners who could work on one themselves, or help somebody else. By the mid 1920's, there was no way an electric car could compete.