Electric Vehicles Trivia
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49 free Electric Vehicles trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Battery cars are older than petrol ones. A Hungarian priest ran a model on an electric motor in 1828, the first road vehicle to beat 100 km/h was electric, and at the turn of the twentieth century more American cars ran on batteries than on petrol. Then the electric starter arrived and the idea went quiet for eighty years. These fifty questions follow the whole arc: the carriage builders and cab fleets of the 1800s, a moon buggy, a wedge-shaped 1970s microcar, the leased coupe that General Motors took back and destroyed, the chemistry Nobel behind every modern battery, the plug wars, racing series built around electric power, and the startups and Chinese giants reshaping the market today. Every sales figure is tied to a year. It suits pub-quiz regulars, car fans and anyone who has ever wondered how a charging plug got its name. Play it on your phone or print it for a quiz night.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In 1900, which power source drove the largest share of American cars, ahead of both battery and petrol?
Steam
Steam led with about 40 per cent of American cars, with battery power close behind and petrol a distant third. Petrol pulled clear once Charles Kettering's 1912 self-starter did away with hand-cranking.
Q 02Which torpedo-shaped battery car, built by Belgian racer Camille Jenatzy, was the first road vehicle to pass 100 km/h?
La Jamais Contente
La Jamais Contente, 'the never satisfied', hit 105.88 km/h in 1899, beating a 92.78 km/h record set only weeks earlier by a rival battery car, the Jeantaud.
Q 03The battery-powered Lunar Roving Vehicle was first driven on the Moon during which mission?
Apollo 15
Apollo 15 carried the first rover in July 1971, making a battery car the first crewed vehicle ever driven on the Moon. Three rovers are still parked up there, one from each of the last three landings.
Q 04Thomas Edison's first car came from which Cleveland maker, whose battery runabouts sold from 1899?
Baker
Baker Motor Vehicle sold Edison his first car, and the inventor returned the favour by designing nickel-iron batteries for some later Bakers. The firm built battery cars in Cleveland from 1899 to 1914.
Q 05Which country's 2016 transport plan set a goal for every new car sold to be zero-emission by 2025?
Norway
Norway nearly hit the target early: battery-electric cars were 88.9 per cent of new-car sales in 2024, helped by purchase taxes that fall hardest on petrol and diesel models.
Q 06Which Chinese microcar, priced from US$4,200, was the world's second best-selling plug-in of 2020?
Wuling Mini EV
The Wuling Mini EV sold 119,255 units in its first six months at a base price of US$4,162, China's cheapest electric car, and owners made a craze of customising theirs.
Q 07Tesla's design chief shattered two 'unbreakable' Cybertruck windows on stage in 2019 by throwing what?
A steel ball
A steel ball thrown by Franz von Holzhausen cracked both windows at the November 2019 reveal; Musk blamed a sledgehammer blow to the door moments earlier for weakening the glass.
Q 08Which carmaker stopped building pure combustion cars in March 2022 and became China's best-selling brand in 2023?
BYD
BYD dropped pure petrol cars to build only plug-in hybrids and EVs, then overtook Volkswagen as China's best-selling car brand in 2023 and Tesla as the world's largest EV maker in 2025.
Q 09Which motorcycle maker, famous for V-twins, launched its first electric bike, the LiveWire, in 2019?
Harley-Davidson
Harley-Davidson aimed the LiveWire at riders beyond its classic V-twin customers, then spun the name off as a separate all-electric brand that listed on the stock market in 2022.
Q 10Which tech giant's secret electric-car effort, codenamed Project Titan, ran from 2014 to 2024?
Apple
Apple never showed a car in public: Project Titan was shut down in February 2024 after a decade, and many of its 2,000 staff were moved to generative AI work.
Q 11Which vacuum-cleaner maker dropped its secret electric car in 2019 as not 'commercially viable'?
Dyson
Dyson had 400 staff working on the car in secret by 2017, but James Dyson scrapped it in October 2019, telling employees he had failed to find a buyer for the project.
Q 12Which rental firm ordered 100,000 Teslas in 2021, then began dumping a third of its EV fleet in 2024?
Hertz
Hertz called Tesla the only maker able to build EVs at scale in 2021, then in January 2024 blamed weak demand and high repair bills as it sold a third of its electric fleet and went back to petrol.
Q 13The Japanese fast-charging standard CHAdeMO takes its name from a pun on an invitation to do what?
Have a cup of tea
Q 21Which was the first major automaker to commit its EVs to Tesla's NACS charging plug, in May 2023?
Ford
Ford said new EVs would get native NACS ports from 2025, with adapters for older cars from 2024; Tesla had opened its plug design to rivals in November 2022, and most major carmakers followed Ford within a year.
Q 22Which delivery vehicle let Britain claim more battery vehicles than the rest of the world combined in 1967?
Milk floats
Milk floats ran on batteries because they were quiet on early-morning rounds; the boast came from the UK Electric Vehicle Association in an August 1967 press release.
Q 23In which country did the priest Ányos Jedlik run a small model car on his own electric motor around 1828?
Hungary
Have a cup of tea: CHAdeMO stands for 'CHArge de MOve' but echoes the Japanese 'o cha demo ikaga desu ka', a joke about how long a charge takes.
Q 14The all-electric Formula E series held its first ever race in September 2014 in which capital city?
Beijing
Beijing hosted the opener of a ten-city debut season that ended with two rounds in London, where the first title was decided by a single point.
Q 15Which 97-year-old became the oldest ever Nobel laureate with the 2019 lithium-ion battery prize?
John Goodenough
John Goodenough shared the chemistry prize with Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino; his 1980 cobalt-oxide cathode lifted a lithium cell from about two volts to four.
Q 16Which startup's R1T became the first modern all-electric pickup delivered to customers, in September 2021?
Rivian
Rivian beat every legacy automaker and Tesla to market with the R1T; Amazon, an early investor, had agreed in 2019 to buy 100,000 of its electric delivery vans.
Q 17Which luxury sedan's Dream Edition earned a 520-mile EPA rating in 2021, the longest of any EV then on sale?
Lucid Air
The Lucid Air's 520-mile figure was still the longest EPA range on the market in 2024; the company began life in 2007 as Atieva, a battery supplier founded by a former Tesla vice-president.
Q 18Since 2019, EU rules have made new electric car models do what below 20 km/h?
Emit a warning sound
Emit a warning sound: a near-silent EV must hum from start-up to about 20 km/h so pedestrians can hear it coming, a rule extended to every new electric and hybrid car in July 2021.
Q 19Which Chinese city's entire fleet of more than 16,000 buses was running on batteries by January 2018?
Shenzhen
Shenzhen's 16,359 battery buses made it the first city in the world with a fully electric fleet, a switch that leaned on national and local subsidies to close the price gap with diesel.
Q 20Which truck startup's promo showed a prototype rolling downhill by gravity, exposed as a sham in 2020?
Nikola
Nikola's One truck had no working drivetrain; short-seller Hindenburg Research called the firm 'an intricate fraud' in September 2020 and founder Trevor Milton was later indicted.
Hungary: Jedlik, a Benedictine teacher in Győr, drove the model with his new motor and a single-use battery, but he only reported the invention decades later.
Q 24Robert Anderson built a crude battery-powered carriage between 1832 and 1839 in which country?
Scotland
Scotland's Robert Anderson worked before rechargeable batteries existed, so his carriage ran on single-use cells that had to be replaced once they were spent.
Q 25Andreas Flocken's 1888 Elektrowagen, an early electric car, came from which German town, Prince Albert's ancestral home?
Coburg
Coburg's Maschinenfabrik A. Flocken added an electrical department in 1888 and built the four-wheeled car the same year, three years after Benz's petrol Motorwagen in Mannheim.
Q 26Which Vermont blacksmith's 1834 motor, America's first DC motor, drove a model car round a short track?
Thomas Davenport
Thomas Davenport and his wife Emily built the motor from scratch, then won the first American patent on an electric machine in 1837; the little track car pointed the way to electric streetcars.
Q 27Gaston Planté's 1859 cell, the first rechargeable battery, survives under most car bonnets as which type?
Lead-acid
Lead-acid: Planté's cell first made it practical to store electricity on board a vehicle, and its descendants still crank petrol engines as the humble 12-volt starter battery.
Q 28Morris and Salom, builders of the Electrobat, put electric hansom cabs on which city's streets in 1897?
New York
New York got a dozen electric hansom cabs from the Philadelphia pair in 1897, and by that August they had carried nearly 5,000 passengers in competition with horse-drawn cabs.
Q 29The world's first police car, an electric wagon of 1899, served which Ohio city?
Akron
Akron's police department took delivery of the battery wagon in 1899, the same year a battery car became the first road vehicle to top 100 km/h.
Q 30Henry Ford's wife Clara drove which battery-car brand, builder of about 13,000 cars from 1907 to 1939?
Detroit Electric
Detroit Electric coupes were advertised at 80 miles per charge and about 20 mph; Henry bought Clara a Model C with a special child seat in 1908, and Edison and Lizzie Borden owned them too.