In 1913, Ford had a prototype electric vehicle built and tested outside his Highland Park, and by early 1914, Ford had committed to building a low-priced electric car. Saying to the The New York Times:

Ford invested $1.5 million ($31.5 million in 2020) in the electric-car project, and signed a deal with Edison for 100,000 nickle-iron batteries. But Edison Electric kept hitting delays and by the time they delivered a working battery, Ford had redoubled his commitment to gasoline.

POD: Edison Electric achieves a breakthrough and completes their advanced, lightweight nickel-iron battery by the end of 1914. The first shipment of the 100,000 battery order is delivered to Henry Ford for the 1915. The car was introduced with a price of $750 (around $15k today) and had a 80 mile range and a Brougham body type so it could be sold to the bourgeoning taxi cab industry. The 1915 Ford Model E is introduced. Model T production ends 12 years earlier than in OTL. The first 100,000 are sold primarily in major cities. R.M. Owen & Company buys the controlling stake in the Baker Electric Car company and Studebaker announces that it intends to prioritize a new generation of its own electric cars. Detroit Electric signs a deal with Edison for batteries as well. Car companies prioritize marketing the cars to their established market: women.

Ford makes a point to target more working-class women and families with advertisements claiming the Model E will allow normal people “to enjoy the luxury of the electric car.” Women make up the majority of drivers in the United States as of 1915, and after 5 years, they are once again the overwhelming majority, as driving is seen increasingly as “women’s work.” That status leads to women entering the workforce en masse during the 1920s as drivers for cab companies and dockside, trainyard, and inner city trucking, as well as drivers for electric streetcars.

The Roaring 20s also sees the continued boom in electrical infrastructure across major cities as more charging stations come online for trucking between factories, retailers, and docks. 70% of all drivers in New York are women, providing a level of financial independence never before seen, and driving many rural women to leave home for the cities. By 1929, the idea of internal combustion engines being used in Cars is looked back on as an absurdity of the early days of the automobile, and gasoline and diesel engines are limited mainly for industrial applications, with the smallest engines used for air travel (though electric airplanes are being experimented on to make commercial aviation seem safer). Cities are denser, majority female, and while there are more coal stacks, there is far less tailpipe emissions than in OTL.

In 1932, FDR and other New Dealers found themselves catering to a particularly loud and well organized base of voters: working women. The Teamsters Union, initially resistant to including women drivers, began accepting them en masse after the Democrats defeat in 1924 and they played a big role in the Minneapolis strikes of 1928. Where their support was once hardly catered to, the Democrats now needed these voters more than ever, making them an important voting bloc of the New Deal Coalition. One of the first executive orders of FDR mandated equal pay between the sexes at the Federal Level, and appointed Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (who led the effort to bring women drivers into the Teamsters Union in this TL) to sit on the National Labor Relations board. In FDR’s first 100 Days, he signed the Equal Pay Act of 1929 mandating all private companies that receive Federal money must provide equal pay regardless of sex or race. One of the New Deal’s earliest public works projects was the construction of a megawatt scale offshore wind farm for New York. Similar projects were stood up across America’s costs, and later in the interior after the passage of the 1936 Rural Electrification Act.

As in Our timeline, World War II sees a massive jobs campaign to get more women into the workplace. While most women entered the civilian workforce as industrial laborers, many women were recruited into the military to continue working as drivers in a non-combat capacity. In every country women served as auxiliaries, but only the western allies (initially) placed women as drivers in the field, with the US and Canada far and away having the largest proportion of female servicemembers.

This creates a major contrast with the Axis powers, especially Japan, where women are not permitted to serve in any capacity. It didn’t take long for the OSS and Office of Naval Intelligence to figure out that this could serve as a prime psyops target, and the Axis powers are bombarded with radio broadcasts, and propaganda flyers telling stories of how Allied Women are freer to stir up dissent among the female populations of the Axis. Frankly, it wasn’t very successful, but those sae stories fed back into the Homefront and fueled wartime and post-war calls for greater rights for women. What was effective as psy-ops were stories of women on the battlefield, as there were numerous examples of female truck drivers and jeep drivers joining a firefight. Many such women earned high honors and citations from their respective militaries, with President Roosevelt awarding the first woman the Congressional Medal of Honor since Mary Edwards Walker during the Civil War in 1943.

The War also saw several crash programs to develop reliable means of powering all the trucks, jeeps, and staff cars being manufactured for the war, including better gas generators, Nickel-metal hydride batteries, and solar panels (the latter of which was used mainly in the Pacific theater). That said, most armies relied on rail infrastructure built before the war to move their troops closer to the front lines, and armored trains continued to be a common sight on the battlefield, with the western Allies having to ship trains in from North America and England. There were a handful of trucks built with miniaturized internal combustion engines like those from 30 years prior, but it was considered not worth the effort to retool and retrain such large portions of the workforce to build and maintain them.

The War ended much as it did in our timeline, and as was the case after World War I, government and industry prepared to demobilize women from the workforce and clear the way for the returning men. However, the increased participation of women in the military, economy, and political arenas made that a far tougher nut to crack. Political pressure and military necessity had given women a greater degree of equality than had ever been seen before, and they weren’t about to give it up for returning men. The Teamsters Union, now led by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, led the effort to organize women in industry in the US, while in Britain, the post-war labor shortage led to the UK’s government overtly encouraging women to remain in the workforce. Strikes in the US, and political pressure from DC forced many industries to avoid forced layoffs of their female employees, 75% of which remained in the workforce.

As a consequence of so many women remaining in the workforce, it become economically disadvantageous to have large families. The post-war baby boom saw an intense spike from 1945 to 1951, but it fell off rather sharply as the economic burden became difficult for working women to justify successive children, returning to near pre-war levels. The financial burden drove more women to demand increased access to contraceptives and family planning services and their demands would eventually shape the Feminist Movement of the mid 1950s and 1960s. The movement cultivated in the pivotal 1962 Supreme Court case Chessen v. Arizona which established a woman’s right to an abortion. These factors had the end result of a Baby Boomer generation of just over 40 million people in the US.

Post-war technology transfer and economic stimulus programs from the Truman administration saw the mass adoption of NiMH batteries and solar energy. These two technologies made it possible for the Southwest to undergo a post-war population explosion as once smaller cities like Los Angeles, Santa Fe, and Phoenix now had the means for cheap energy.

During the Eisenhower administration, the country initiated the Interstate Highspeed Rail Act, inspired by Germany’s numerous highspeed rail projects like the “Fliegender Hamburger” line. Importantly, these trains all used electric locomotives similar to the German and Italian designs first introduced in the 1930s. Gas generators were only included for long-haul routs in areas with limited electrical infrastructure. Electric high speed rail had been experimented with in the US through projects like the Pioneer Zephyr, but the Eisenhower Administration’s program was by far the most ambitious such project the world had ever seen. One side effect of the project was the continued use of the Streamliner locomotive designs in the US, and more international competition between Japanese and American locomotive manufactures later in the 20th century.

Highspeed rail, inexpensive power, cheap capital, and a gender integrated workforce made the United States the most productive and prosperous economy on Earth. Commuter towns along the growing High Speed Rail networks grew ever larger, while closer to the cities suburban communities cropped up near the edges. However, without a network of Interstate Highways, the suburbs would never come to dominate the landscape. Cities and small towns would remain dense and more walkable. As electric vehicles improved charge times and range, some (automobile lobbyists) suggested building a network of highways across the country. However this plan was seen as laughably expensive and unnecessary given the dominance of rail. Cars were for the town and the city, not the countryside after all.

In Los Angeles, the post-war population explosion necessitated a new plan for the cities future. In the late 1920s, Frank Lloyd Wright had proposed a series of public works projects defined by terraced walkways, sunken roads and subways, flanked by rows of buildings in the Mayan Revivals style. During the New Deal, Wright’s plan for Los Angeles never got beyond his design for City Hall.

Post War, Los-Angeles began to fully implement Wright’s plan with a series of new zoning codes and city ordinances. As LA’s population grew, developers threw up as many new buildings as they could build, hoping to cash in on a wave of new renters and small business owners. By the end of the 1960s Los Angeles would absorb and annex many of its neighboring cities, its borders stretching as far south as Watts and shifting east until it hit the San Gabriel River. Fearing eventual absorption, Santa Ana, Newport Beach, Pasadena, Long Beach, and Whittier, and other cities of Los Angeles County began adopting similar urban planning policies. By the 1980s, many of the cities would be amalgamated into the Los Angeles boroughs.

One major change to Wright’s old plan was the inclusion of electric trolley cars operated by Pacific Electric, with subways being seen as too dangerous for the earthquake prone LA. Los Angeles’s post-war urbanization proved to be the model for much of the Southwestern United States. Phoenix, San Jose, Fresno, San Diego, and Tuscon would all adopt Maya Revivalist styles and the terraced layout of Los Angeles. Meanwhile in the Northwest, Seattle eventually resurrected and modified Virgil Bogue’s “Plan of Seattle,” for a network of subways beneath a Rustic meets Parisian urban plan, which San Francisco subsequently copied and proceeded to claim was their idea first.

By the mid-1970s America is a cleaner, more urban, more egalitarian country than the one we knew. High speed rail has bound the country together, while municipal street cars, light rail, and electric cars have made cities much more livable. American cities look a lot like their European counterparts, rather than the endless sprawl we know in OTL. As a consequence, American politics is more similar to Europe’s as well. While there is a Conservative Revolution, it is not the one we know: Nancy Gable is the Republican nominee in 1980, not Ronald Reagan. The woman who in OTL would be known as Nancy Reagan was a great beneficiary of the empowerment of women that now defined America. During her years as a member of the Screen Actors Guild board of directors she eventually rose to become the 13th President of SAG in 1959. In 1960, Nancy lost her husband Clark Gable to a heart attack, she never remarried, and instead devoted herself entirely to a political career, becoming the first woman to be elected Governor of California in 1966. She expertly fostered the growing conservative movement in the United States and in 1980 was elected America’s first female President. Nancy Gable was not nearly as success as Ronald Reagan at dismantling the New Deal. She was able to exploit the country’s transition to a more service based economy, and use the backlash against the Teamster’s Union’s after the discovery of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn’s ties to the USSR to dismantle the power of unions. The electric car and an early women’s liberation do not prevent the neoliberal era, because white women are still white.

In 1989, Gable is succeeded by her Vice President one George H.W. Bush who’s Presidency is largely uneventful save for the 1987 Wall Street Crash. In 1992 the Democrats return to power with Texas Governor Anne Richards. The Richards administration would preside over a period of massive economic growth and social upheaval. Richards would be seen as second only to LBJ in terms of her record on civil rights, appointing Hillary Diane Rodham as the nation’s first female Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Rodham would go on to give the majority opinion extending marriage equality to same-sex couples in 1996. Richards would be succeeded in 2000 by Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson (Texas is a Blue State, and George W. Bush is just a baseball commissioner in this TL). Thompson ran as a Compassionate Conservative, and his record as a pro-abortion Republican made it possible for him to win one of the widest margins of victory since LBJ. Thompson made good on his pledge, largely supporting conservative “status-quo” judicial appointments, limiting intervention in the economy, and like his predecessor keeping foreign entanglements to a minimum. The major exception to this was with Russia, who began to take a more confrontational stance with the US over Eastern Europe’s gradual votes to join NATO and the EU. The crux of this confrontation began near the end of Thompson’s second term over Georgia, which was seeking EU membership; a bridge too far for Russia.

Late in 2008 Russia invaded Georgia, which prompted NATO to increase its defense posture in Turkey and cancel the planned closure of Ramstein AFB (which ceased to be an essential position to the US after the end of the Cold War, and with no war in the Middle East to fight). The US further pushed the EU to explore alternatives to its reliance on Russian raw material exports, namely metals and neon essential to the semiconductor industry. The standoff over Georgia would last through McCain’s single term (ended by the stock market crash of 2010), and most of Cecile Richards two terms, ending in 2018 after Russia’s attempted invasion of Kazakhstan (a growing source of rare earth elements and importantly Lithium) ended after only a few months of fighting and crippling sanctions by the wider world. Richards would spend the remaining years of her administration crafting a post-war order in the form of a genuine successor to NATO and a free trade (but not common currency) zone that included the US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Australia, the EU states, Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and several former Russian Republics. This new union was seen by many as a “First World Only” union at best, and an American Empire at worst designed to supplant the UN after its complete failure to stop Russia.