But an ICE car is an obvious improvement in both cost and usability to a horse-drawn carriage. Half of the value of an EV is that it's cheaper and easier to refuel. Making everyone who'd want one pay thousands to install infrastructure for them removes a lot of the reason you'd ever buy one, since it's otherwise essentially the same as an ICE car in terms of usage.

If anything, right now, an EV is literally a worse car to an equivalent ICE in terms of what it's capable of. The reasons you'd have one is either general environmental altruism or because it'll be cheaper over the long term to own one.

Back when horse drawn carriages were the most common, EVs looked better than ICEs.

We had to find the petroleum reserves before diesel and petrol could get cheap enough for ICEs to fully dominate over that era's EVs.

Sure, but that's not really relevant to the point I'm trying to make. People moved away from animal-based travel to cars because cars had distinct improvements in usability and upkeep cost. It was ok to have the infrastructure come later because they were still an obvious improvement even without the infrastructure being in place yet.

Right now, if I want an EV, I'm paying 20% more money to buy it, it's got a shorter range than my ICE for the same size car, and the infrastructure to do things like long trips with multiple recharges isn't there yet.

Okay, I'm interested, how did one get car fuel back then? Did people have to send one of their servants to a chemist for a mixture?

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filling_station#United_States :

> The first "drive-in" filling station, Gulf Refining Company, opened to the motoring public in Pittsburgh on December 1, 1913, at Baum Boulevard and St Clair's Street. Prior to this, automobile drivers pulled into almost any general or hardware store, or even blacksmith shops in order to fill up their tanks.

No, but only because gas station idea (drive through automated fuel retail) wasn't a thing.

However a human with a fuel reserve that could top you up was a thing before cars (a fuel retail). Before the dawn of the automobiles people were replacing steam engines with gas and liquid powered engines.