You do realize these vehicles had cranks to start them, right? Charles Kettering didn't invent the electric starter for vehicles until 1911...So depending upon the year, some of those vehicles might have been converted over to electric. As many car collectors do to avoid having to hand crank a vehicle.
In 1911,
Charles F. Kettering, with
Henry M. Leland, of Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (
DELCO), invented and filed
U.S. Patent 1,150,523 for an electric starter in America. (Kettering had replaced the hand crank on
NCR's
cash registers with an electric motor five years earlier.)
One aspect of the invention lay in the realization that a relatively small motor, driven with higher voltage and current than would be feasible for continuous operation, could deliver enough power to crank the engine for starting. At the voltage and current levels required, such a motor would burn out in a few minutes of continuous operation, but not during the few seconds needed to start the engine. The starters were first installed by
Cadillac on
production models in 1912, with the same system being adopted by
Lanchester later that year.
[3] These starters also worked as
generators once the engine was running, a concept that is now being revived in
hybrid vehicles.