I agree about everything else, but I'm not sure about this:
> The situation wasn't as absurd with EVs, but we definitely could have built a commuter EV at least a decade before we did. Look into the GM EV1 from the 1990s, which pre-dated the Nissan LEAF -- the first mass market EV, which did beat Tesla on that front -- and it had similar range and performance. The EV1 was killed in spite of demand becuase the conventional auto industry hated EVs. Some still do, like Toyota.
Could we have actually built an affordable commuter EV a decade earlier?
OTOH, perhaps the extra demand would just have made prices fall sooner, given the other graph in the link shows the relationship between market size and price, rather than year of price…
> The situation wasn't as absurd with EVs, but we definitely could have built a commuter EV at least a decade before we did. Look into the GM EV1 from the 1990s, which pre-dated the Nissan LEAF -- the first mass market EV, which did beat Tesla on that front -- and it had similar range and performance. The EV1 was killed in spite of demand becuase the conventional auto industry hated EVs. Some still do, like Toyota.
Could we have actually built an affordable commuter EV a decade earlier?
Eyeballing this graph, batteries were about 6x more expensive a decade before Tesla actually started delivering the Roadster: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
OTOH, perhaps the extra demand would just have made prices fall sooner, given the other graph in the link shows the relationship between market size and price, rather than year of price…