You mean petrol/gas, steam and electric right?The 3 car types available at the start of the 20th century were the petrol/gas car, the ethanol car and the electric car.
That's going to be a hard sell given Coalinga was spotted back in the 1880s.Ethanol powered cars may have won out over the gas/petrol engines if there had be delays in discovering new oil fields after the original oil fields in Pennsylvannia ran dry...
Most people in the western world don't really need cars. Hells, LA got by with mostly public transport back pre-war didn't they?And by that logic, the vast majority of Americans don't "really need cars".