1. If that were true, EVs would have been much more successful in America. They haven't been. The Nissan Leaf was around long before Tesla and it never went far, because the range sucks.
2. Back in 1900, 100 miles would have been great. In 2000, it's not sufficient at all for most car-owning Americans.
3. You can't have the same range at higher speeds: energy usage goes up dramatically with speed. So you need much more energy storage, and the battery tech of the time just wasn't sufficient.
>I wonder how that one would have played out if we didn't have oil. The abundance of cheap fossil fuels didn't make it exactly worthwhile to invest in battery R&D.
That's a very good point. It would be interesting to see an alternate universe where this was the case.
The problem is that, because of cars, they built everything farther apart, and people willingly chose places to live farther away from work. Just look at a map of the city of Phoenix AZ for instance: 100 miles' range won't cover a trip from one side of the city to the other side and back.
However, for vacations, a rental car is absolutely the right idea. That's what people here in Tokyo do: there's lots of convenient places to rent a car for shopping trips to Costco, or a trip to the mountains, etc., because so many people don't own cars.
Agreed on the speed, but 100 miles range on a single charge? That's more than enough to account for the needs of the vast majority of commuters.
> until Lithium-ion batteries because cheap and commonplace, which was only in the last 20 years.
I wonder how that one would have played out if we didn't have oil. The abundance of cheap fossil fuels didn't make it exactly worthwhile to invest in battery R&D.