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50 free Electric Vehicles trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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 40 per cent of American cars in 1900, battery power took 38 per cent and petrol just 22 per cent. Petrol only pulled clear after Charles Kettering's self-starter ended hand-cranking in 1912.
Q 02Which torpedo-shaped Belgian car became the first road vehicle to pass 100 km/h, in April 1899?
La Jamais Contente
La Jamais Contente, 'the never satisfied', hit 105.88 km/h on batteries with Camille Jenatzy driving. It beat 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 05Norway's 2016 transport plan set a goal for all new cars sold to be zero-emission by which year?
2025
2025 was the target, and Norway nearly hit it early: battery-electric cars were 88.9 per cent of new-car sales in 2024, the world's highest share for years running.
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 on sale and was China's cheapest electric car at US$4,162 for the base model. Global sales have since passed 1.1 million.
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, China's top brand since 2023, stopped building pure combustion cars in March 2022?
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 a different rider from its classic V-twin customers, and it was the company's first electric vehicle of any kind.
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 chased an electric, self-driving vehicle for a decade and ended in 2024 without a product.
Q 11Which vacuum-cleaner maker dropped its secret electric car in 2019 as not 'commercially viable'?
Dyson
Dyson had 400 people working on the car by 2017 and planned three models in a $3 billion project, but James Dyson said in October 2019 that there were not enough buyers to make it viable.
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 13Which Japanese fast-charging standard takes its name from a pun on 'how about a cup of tea?'
CHAdeMO
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 the design of its plug in November 2022 and SAE standardised it as J3400.
Q 22Which delivery vehicle gave Britain more battery vehicles than the rest of the world combined in 1967?
Milk floats
Milk floats from local dairies made up most of the world's battery road vehicles for much of the twentieth century; the UK Electric Vehicle Association made the claim in an August 1967 press release.
Q 23Which Hungarian priest ran a small model car on his own newly invented electric motor in 1828?
Ányos Jedlik
CHAdeMO stands for 'CHArge de MOve' but also echoes the Japanese 'o cha demo ikaga desu ka', a joke about the time a charge takes. TEPCO launched it in 2010 with Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi and Subaru.
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 for the battery in every phone and EV; his 1980 cobalt-oxide cathode doubled the capacity of earlier lithium cells.
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, and its biggest customer is Amazon, which agreed in 2019 to buy 100,000 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 18European Union rules since 2019 make electric cars play an artificial warning sound up to what speed?
20 km/h
20 km/h is the cut-off: below it an EU-approved EV must hum at a minimum of 56 decibels so pedestrians can hear it coming, a rule extended to all new quiet cars from 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 world's first city with a fully electric fleet, and they were built by the hometown company that is now the world's biggest EV maker.
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.
Ányos Jedlik's 1828 motor, kept today at Budapest's Museum of Applied Arts, pushed a model powered by a non-rechargeable battery, decades before any full-size electric carriage.
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; practical electric cars had to wait for the lead-acid battery of 1859.
Q 25Andreas Flocken's 1888 Elektrowagen, the first electric production car, came from which German town?
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 27Which Frenchman's 1859 lead-acid battery first made storing electricity on board a vehicle viable?
Gaston Planté
Gaston Planté's cell was the first rechargeable battery of any kind, and its descendants are still widely used in cars today as the humble starter battery under the bonnet.
Q 28Morris and Salom built the Electrobat, a pioneering American battery car, in 1894 in which city?
Philadelphia
Philadelphia's Henry G. Morris, a mechanical engineer, and chemist Pedro G. Salom built it, three years before New York got its first fleet of battery taxis.
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 13,000 coupes 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.