I have on my bookshelf a book from 20 years ago, which includes a feasibility study commissioned by a major auto company, that concluded that mass market electric cars would not be economically feasible until around 2020, but after that would wipe out the existing ICE industry.

The public may have thought that electric cars were all but dead. But smart people knew that their time had not yet come.

Oh, and look! Excepting high end niches that Tesla figured out, and government subsidies, that timeline from 20 years ago looks to come true pretty much on schedule.

I admire Elon Musk. Without him, reusable rockets wouldn't have happened for many more years. But electric cars would have happened with or without him.

Tons of environmental consequences for mining lithium and cobalt that are swept under the rug, not to mention battery disposal costs, when talking about electric cars -- https://www.engineering.com/ElectronicsDesign/ElectronicsDes...

Electric cars were not all but dead. They've actually been quite prevalent, it was just done largely pre-WWW so you didn't see a lot of the hype. It also wasn't that feasible because of the lack of technology.

And since companies were actually trying to make money, and cars were becoming more fuel efficient, there wasn't the demand. In fact, there still isn't that high of a demand for electric cars these days.

I'm not discounting that Tesla made some innovations. But people make it out like Tesla radically changed the functionality of the electric car when it's still largely the same technology, just more advanced.

To give an example, the Nissan Leaf was out well before people even heard of Tesla, and that was one of the most popular and widely sold electric vehicles. At the time, Tesla only had the 100k Roadster.

Tesla was the first to show that electric cars could look good and be performant. Before this the prototypes were excessively aerodynamic and underpowered (probably because of range anxiety). Unfortunately for the environment good aerodynamics make for ugly cars.

I'd argue it was because of battery technology. There was a substantial advance at around 2004 by decreasing the diameter of lithium iron phosphate particles. This increased the capacity significantly of LIB's. Then you have a couple of years of commercialization, then you bring it to market at high cost, then manufacturing process improvements drive the cost lower.

Other improvements drive the capacity even higher through packaging innovations and possible manufacturing improvements as well.

I highly doubt it was due to range anxiety. Even the early Tesla roadster could, at most, go 200 miles. That's nothing on a gasoline engine.

The Nissan Leaf does not look that ugly. It looked like your standard hatchback for the time.

I’m arguing that Tesla ignored range anxiety and traded range for power and style. The other manufacturers weren’t willing to do it.

Batteries did improve but its not like Tesla had access to better batteries than GM (at least in their early days).

> Unfortunately for the environment good aerodynamics make for ugly cars.

1955; drag coefficient 0.36:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_DS

Since then we've come quite a bit further, the TM3 has 0.23, which is a substantial improvement but neither car looks ugly.

I think most North American consumers would consider it ugly (I do), but I haven't done a survey.

The Nissan Leaf was released 2 years before the first Tesla.