Summary: Hybrid electric and full electric vehicles have a long history, actually being preferred to gasoline vehicles until Henry Ford overcame some of the difficulties with gasoline powered vehicles.
History
In 1904, Ford essentially killed the electric vehicle, although there were some attempts to use hybrids to add power in the following years. In 1966, Congress first recommended looking into electric vehicles to reduce emissions. In the 1970s, during the oil embargo, hybrids got a serious look, with GM spending $20 million in research, promising to have electric vehicles being mass produced by the mid-1980s. In 1997, the Prius was launched in Japan two years early. Also in the late 1990s, America's big automakers produced some electric vehicles, which, despite their popularity, were destroyed. It took until 2004 for the Prius to win Car of the Year Awards from Motor Trend Magazine and the North American Auto Show, at which point hybrids began to become more popular within the US.