I took the OP challenge to mean "as early as possible." That is, if at all possible, pre-empt the dominance of the internal combustion engine (and also the third strong contender, steam power) completely, and if not completely, then anyway maintain the strong position electric cars
started with historically.
We should recall that this was the case. To be sure, it was not until Ford and other competing IC engine car makers developed versions with electric starters and addressed some other issues that automobiles became a truly mass commodity; in the days when steam and electric cars outnumbered gasoline burners relatively few people owned any kind of motor vehicle. But in this period, the automobile went from being an inventor's curiosity to something people did see every day, even if most of them did not themselves own one.
And in those early days, electric battery powered cars were in a very strong competitive position. Starting up an IC engine was a tricky and dangerous business then, and the engines, although already light, were not very powerful, unreliable, noisy and smelly. Steam power was reliable, quiet and otherwise inoffensive and early steam cars were the most powerful too, able to achieve the best speeds (though roads were pretty awful so using that power effectively was often impossible). But you had to wait a while to get boiler pressure up; even top of the line Stanley or Doble cars required a minute or so to heat up their flash boilers--and those were really expensive. The advantage IC had over steam in fuel efficiency would not have been practically apparent yet--though IC engines also avoided the need to constantly refill water tanks as well, since putting a condenser on the steam cars would weigh them down even more than the boiler did, and limit them in other ways--those advantages were apparent enough.
Compared to the drawbacks of either type of heat engine, battery power had considerable appeal in these early days of slow speed and minimum auxiliary demands. If the battery were charged, you just put in your key (or in more trusting places, simply threw the switch) and away you went, no noise, no wait, no danger and no fuss. Of course eventually, even with the low power demands of the slow traffic of the day which only had to compete with horses trotting at a sustainable pace, the battery gets drained and must be recharged, and batteries have a finite cycle lifetime after which they must be replaced. But old-fashioned as these times were, electricity (in various forms) was widely available in most places prosperous enough to contain prospective auto purchasers, and those buyers were the people who could face the cost of a recharge and eventual battery replacement the most cheerfully.
Now here's one problem--this is all very well for getting around a town, but what if one wants to journey from one city to another, or has business in the countryside? In the early days it didn't matter; it was a crazy quixotic Odyssey to try to move an automobile across country roads meant for horse-drawn traffic, and no one (except maybe the steam car drivers) could expect to find any infrastructure for fuel or maintenance. One might as well plan to carry some replacement batteries fully charged, perhaps towed along in a cart, as hope to find gasoline for an IC engine--steamers could be more flexible as to what they burned but I bet even they were a challenge to move--especially since they were heavier, so much the worse on the bad roads. (Though they also had the power to muscle out of bogs that might trap the other two).
So bottom line--electric cars, until one has the sort of futuristic and expensive ultra-high-tech advances we are seeing nowadays, are for cities. If you have to go out on a long haul trip or haul goods to a farm out in the sticks, you had better have a heat engine car. It took time for those to become good enough to reliably do that, and for making roads accessible to motor vehicles to become a priority (and when it did, the cost was high and the task took decades). But it would seem the electric car's days were numbered by that.
However, is this or is this not an Alternate
History site? The economic determinist argument that the IC, as the most concentrated power source and the most broadly applicable, at any rate trounces the electric cars when it matures enough (steam might still be in the running, but eventually defeated by higher unit costs if you want decent amenities like fast starting and not having to stop continually for more water--bottom line is steam is heavier, and cost goes roughly with weight) seems pretty sound. The early electric cars have no prayer--under capitalism.
But it is a fact that in the 19th century and early 20th, even in as rich and growing nations as the USA with our strong standards of respecting property rights, radical socialist movements of varying but broadly similar aims were quite widespread. What if the Reds take over somewhere? Specifically, what if this happens not in peripheral and poor, civil war torn Russia or Mexico, but in a strong and rich capitalist nation, such as say the USA?
I submit that if, when the dust settles, we have a popular and socialist regime in the USA say by 1910, there is then a real prospect that the electric car will be strongly favored. It will be in a "niche" to be sure; it cannot serve in the countryside nor (without a very long drawn out major infrastructural investment that would take decades to realize) serve for intercity road trips. But the "niche" might be very big--use within developed urban and even reasonably close/compact suburban regions. This is where most of the people in a highly developed capitalist nation live. OTL I'm not sure when the USA shifted from majority-countryside to majority-urban, but it couldn't have been much later than the early decades of the last century. A socialist revolution might well accelerate that movement; if the cities are being renovated to be more livable and friendly to the working poor majority, and the big new industrial projects are concentrated there, then the bright lights will draw in folks from the countryside which is relatively backward and neglected all the faster.
To very vaguely sketch out the sort of libertarian, syndicalist socialism I'm talking about, imagine a unification of radical labor unrest with the discontents of the countryside in the Gilded Age as embodied by the People's Party aka the "Populists." The latter are suspicious of the foreign-influenced radicalism of labor leaders, but they share a common enemy in big capital. OTL some of the Populists championed some reforms in the money system and infrastructure that strike me as quite shrewd, pragmatic, and yet visionary, and their ideology of wealth to the hands-on creators of wealth could bridge over to anarcho-syndicalists. The latter also are skeptical of state power and seek for the common people to take power by seizing control of their centralized, industrial work places and manage them on a mutually cooperative basis, within the plant and between them. In the post-revolutionary balance of power, the Populists would become the more conservative interest, and just how the syndicalists cities would evolve remains an exercise in detailed TL building that is beyond me here in this reply. But let's suppose a fairly amicable balance of power does develop; the Pops stand for a continuation of private wealth but on a smaller scale, with regulations and infrastructure keeping it widely distributed on the land. The workers of the syndicalist federations that are the transformed cities are individualist, willing to see some do better than others on an apparent basis of merit, but assert effective control over wealth as a whole and are drawn into continual active democratic politics as part of their way of life.
In this context, I can see many city Communes considering and rejecting the idea of encouraging or even allowing IC engine vehicles to operate on their streets. The essential advantages of gasoline burner cars do not apply very strongly in the cities. They can go fast, but there aren't a lot of streets where allowing them to do so is a good idea. A tank of gas is the most concentrated way of carrying energy, but with speeds slow and ranges low within city limits, this advantage is also pretty moot; a battery can do the job and be readily recharged from many sources. The electric cars are quiet, reliable, simple to operate, not capable of reaching dangerous speeds but fast enough in the crowded urban streets. They don't produce noxious fumes, they don't carry lots of flammable fuel in case of accidents. (Steam cars and trucks are quiet and relatively clean too, but they do carry risky fuel--probably not nearly as dangerous as gasoline, but still a hazard, and their steam is also dangerous if released).
Thus, the syndical committees that rule the Communes might well resolve to exclude gasoline and even steam vehicles from their streets. To sweeten the deal for their workers, who as they prosper are increasingly keen to have cars of their own, they can even enhance the utility of electric vehicles considerably with public infrastructure. There can be many charging stations made available, and programs to exchange batteries and ultimately recycle them. It might be possible to devise some system of providing current freely for vehicles moving on high-speed, high-density expressways, allowing the motor to switch from running on a battery to running on the track current which can even allow higher speeds.
Even given the primitive state of electronics, I don't think it is too Utopian even to introduce semi-automatic control of the cars! I have decided to omit the details since it getting off topic, but I think it is doable with essentially telegraphic communications and fairly simple punch-controlled electro-mechanical systems on board. At any rate, some kind of automatic steering on powered streets should be easy to implement, keeping the cars on track and rolling at a standard speed, and even controlling intersections to allow cross-traffic to pass with a minimum of stopping. (Besides, electric cars are particularly easy to stop and start).
I suspect that with a revolution in the nineteen-oughts and the new society finding its balance by 1910, such powered, and even automatic road systems might be common and standardized in the bigger cities by 1920 and be spreading rapidly to every substantial town. With standardization these cars can be quite cheap I'd think. Indeed it might be possible to skip private ownership completely and simply purchase a big stock of commonly shared people-mover cars that are left in numerous parking spots for anyone to take.
I wonder--could the trolley car lines, as they see that they're losing business and most won't survive, try to turn things around by selling electricity at charging stations? Then you could drive downtown, park and have your car be charging, and when you leave, be fully charged. True, the car would need to be able to accept current at both 600 volts DC and house current.
To make this viable, there would need to be something to suggest a shortage of gasoline was in the offing. Perhaps if the rebels had somehow made their rebellion stick, and threatened an oil embargo against the USA?
See, this is why I'm imagining a socialist regime instead of capitalist. Trying to charge individuals on a competitive basis works if we are recharging batteries but that takes a long time. If the pre-revolutionary trolleys are socialized, it is possible to simply provide power on the go on the existing or replaced transit lines for as many cars as fit. If the commune provides this service to all comers for free, there is no need to try and figure out who uses what current, just to observe when the system is getting overloaded and then upgrade it until it is adequate.
The rebels have made their revolution stick--in the USA that is, and the Americans like it. It's their revolution and society is being reshaped for their individual convenience.
With a setup like this in the developed areas where most people live, the market for countryside cars (steam or gasoline) is restricted to the less populated areas, where the rising demand for cars and trucks is met by syndicalist factories specializing in that market. The IC vehicles are developed there, serving mainly to bring people and goods to and from railheads.
One of the Populist proposals was to adopt a system of Federal or state/local governmental (or cooperative) warehouses on the rail lines where farmers could take their produce and sell it, at a fixed price (presumably graded for quality) for dollars whose value would be determined by the national material product--IE the Populist dollar would be backed by the basket of material goods produced by the farms and factories, not by gold or even silver. (Gold and silver would of course be included in the basket--a lot of Populists were miners, not farmers!) The farmer thus disposes of his goods without worrying about market fluctuations; the co-op or government now owns them and negotiates to distribute or sell them anywhere in the nation, via the rail roads that are perhaps nationalized, or anyway regulated (in fashions repeatedly struck down by the pro-corporate Supreme Court of OTL).
The easiest way for a country family to visit a city would be to drive to the nearest rail station, get on board (for free or for a reasonable price) and ride the trains wherever they want to go, and in town rent or borrow an electric car as needed. So there would be little need to develop roads for cars for long range travel.
Nevertheless this is supposed to be a democracy, the people are still individualistic Americans, and they might want to be able to drive instead of ride.
Some DIY types have had trailer mounted generator sets for long trips. In another range situation in the past, electric busses used quick change battery trailers, they'd swing by a trailer depot and swap out their low charge battery trailers.
Yes. With the option of charger trailers to convert any electric car into a gas burning hybrid temporarily, if the romance of the open road still prevails in this ATL socialist America, even the urban electric cars can join in on it. I suspect the urban cars would be a poor fit, being designed for relatively light work they won't hold up well on the highway, even if the highway is as well engineered as OTL American modern roadways are.
But it can be done.
Now can it be done later, as many posters wonder?
Well, Jello Biafra has gone ahead and imagined a Communist north America (the UASR, not the USA anymore) with the revolution happening in the mid-30s. By then it would be too late I'd think; internal combustion cars had become the norm, with all infrastructure set up for them. A revolutionary regime such as she imagines might wish to encourage, by positive incentives, people using public transit whenever reasonably convenient and using rail and air for long distance travel. But it does seem to be a fact of human nature around the world that people want cars. They might be able to persuade considerably larger numbers than ever considered an electric car to use one, but most of those people will still want access to a gasoline IC car to do what the electric car can't. Transforming the cities to enable better electric cars running on public current, or even to provide lots of convenient charging stations, will run up against competition from the gas-burners that most people already have and that everyone else wants. It's supposed to be democratic communism so the will of the people will prevail. I gather she envisions a gradual evolution toward more public transit and the slow extinction of the gasoline automobile, but that's based on a piece set some 60 or 80 years after the Revolution!
In the 1930s of course the USA was an exporter of petroleum, and in the ATL the regime does in fact invest heavily in nuclear power after the Great War II years (that is, the 1950s and later)--to save the lives of coal miners, mainly. I agree with the mainstream of comments here that in these circumstances even a Communist America would seek to use the power to synthesize fuel for more or less traditional IC engines rather than to switch over to electric storage, until anyway the technology of power storage were much advanced, to at least current OTL levels and perhaps beyond.
So honestly, I think the best way to make electric cars win out over IC decisively is to have a socialist revolution before Ford and his low-price competitors find their mass market. After the mid-20s it is just plain too late; even 1915 might be too late. It can be done--but not under capitalism!