Baker Electric vehicle

The late-night television host Jay Leno, an avid car collector, has a 1909 Baker Electric vehicle that still runs with its original Edison batteries. 

The Ford Model T, which at one point had 50 percent of the vehicle market in North America, had the added disadvantage of a gravity-fed fuel system that worked poorly on hills. Common practice for Model T owners was to stop, turn around, and drive backward up hills to avoid stalling. The Baker Electric had no issues with hills. 

Invention in EVs and HEVs was demonstrated as early as 1900. The Baker EVs, which demonstrated a top speed exceeding 22 miles per hour (mph), were popular in the early 1900s [1]. Jay Leno, the host of The Tonight Show, owns one such vehicle, which is still operational. A hybrid EV using batteries and chargers was developed and tested by Walter Baker in the first hybrid-based electric car (the Torpedo). This particular hybrid electric car... 

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