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

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.