alt-hist: a world without cars

[Johan Larson]

How could you get a world very much like the modern first world, but without cars? Or maybe there are cars, but they aren't used much.

Would having no oil do it? Without oil, there would still be coal and water power and nuclear plants, all of which do just fine at producing the electrical power that the modern world runs on. But until very recently, it was hard to store electrical power in a form anywhere near as dense as gasoline, which made electric car distinctly disappointing.

Or would we need to get rid of natural gas too? Big tanks of pressurized natural gas aren't as convenient as gas tanks full of liquid, but maybe they'd do well enough to get cars on the road in the early twentieth century.