One thing about these early electric cars that gets overlooked is how primitive their motors were.
Yes, induction motors existed then because Nikola Tesla had invented them, but they couldn't be used in a car because they required AC. So cars were stuck with brushed DC motors. Those work but they're not maximally efficient and the brushes eventually wear out and need to be replaced.
Today we use efficient induction and brushless DC motors in cars, and those are only possible because we have cheap power electronics that can chop up a DC voltage into an AC waveform of arbitrary complexity with fine precision. Power electronics didn't exist until the 1960s, and they only got cheap in the 1990s.
I don't know how efficient brushed DC motors were. Nowadays, I see 80% efficiency, it was probably lower back then, plus, you probably had to have some kind of transmission, maybe it couldn't run at the optimal regime, etc... So let's say 50%.
Pretty terrible compared to modern engines that are >90% but that's just about twice more "fuel". Not negligible, but fairly small compared to everything else.
As for the brushes, they are cheap carbon rods. I guess that on a car, it would be like changing the brake pads. Not much, especially compared to the amount of maintenance cars needed at the time.
Compare to early internal combustion engines that were about 5% efficiency in the early 1900s and have steadily increased to almost 40% today. That's 8 times!
So yeah, their electric engines were primitive, but their gas engines were even more so, the that would have been in favor of electric.
edit: Nikola Tesla is credited with inventing many things he did not invent. He was very skilled and prolific at patenting his improvements on existing inventions, though.
He didn't think it up in the first place and he wasn't the first person who built one, but he got several patents e.g. [0] on the idea and his designs were the first commercially successful ones in the United States. Westinghouse and others then improved the idea further, and Italians would probably take a different view of all the above.
Tesla made induction motors practical.
I don't think it's wrong to say (informally, to a first approximation) that Tesla invented the induction motor. Edison didn't think up the light bulb either, but by virtue of making light bulbs practical it's not wrong to refer to him informally as the "inventor" of the light bulb.
This is true of most "inventions". The first person to think it up often can't put the idea to practical use or find any commercial success. Often material science or manufacturability isn't ready yet. Or the idea isn't very useful until it is paired with several other innovations to make a complete product.
Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, the guy who invented the electrolytic capacitor, also patented the field-effect transistor in 1930. But he never made one, material science just wasn't there yet. (This is why the Nobel for "inventing the transistor" went to a completely different team who were using a different method 17 years later) Power electronics requires the whole suite of semiconductor technology: atomically pure silicon crystals, dopants, vacuum coating, lithography, etc. First VFD motor controller wasn't until 1982.
The technology wasn't even remotely ready yet in 1912. Remember, the GM EV1 of 1996, with VFD drive and NiMH batteries that didn't exist and couldn't exist in 1912, still only managed a hundred miles of range. Despite the conspiracy theories, the EV1 wasn't a very compelling car. It required better batteries and motors to get something like a Tesla a decade later.
Yes, induction motors existed then because Nikola Tesla had invented them, but they couldn't be used in a car because they required AC. So cars were stuck with brushed DC motors. Those work but they're not maximally efficient and the brushes eventually wear out and need to be replaced.
Today we use efficient induction and brushless DC motors in cars, and those are only possible because we have cheap power electronics that can chop up a DC voltage into an AC waveform of arbitrary complexity with fine precision. Power electronics didn't exist until the 1960s, and they only got cheap in the 1990s.