1909 Baker Electric

[thesameguy]

But....

It's not like people just stopped making electric cars for no reason. Electric cars were initially easier to make, but they ran into logistic, technological, and functional problems that could not be overcome at the time. It's not like people didn't try, but it was still quicker to make more complicated, less well understood ICEs than to push BEV development. ICEs addressed the limitations of electric cars without introducing new challenges (that we were aware of at the time). There just wasn't a scenario where BEVS were a way forward. If for whatever reason ICEs simply could not exist, we'd be driving steam cars. If BEVs were literally the only forward, we would have spent the 20s, 30s, and possibly 40s figuring out how to go more 40 miles from home. How to move people at more than 25mph. Sticking with BEVs would have been an enormous roadblock to an innumerable other sciences and industries. Sure, maybe they'd be more advanced now, but a mind boggling number of other things would have been seriously hamstrung. All that time mankind was doing stuff would have been spent trying to figure out how to get to the next town at more than 25mph.

I wouldn't say all this stuff is bad. Maybe mass transit would have done better in this country or maybe we'd have paid more attention to the cities. But we'd probably also all have an extra 100 years of lead acid battery waste and maybe a shortage of lithium. So, you know, I think we did what we needed to do and everything's mostly ok. If we wanna play the "100 years of research" game, my vote would go to quantum physics and matter teleportation or maybe Face/Off machines - not BEVs.

[George]

Watched the whole video. Enjoyed it.