What about electric cars wasn't "viable" in 2003? That was the year Toyota released their all electric RAV4 in California...
Unlike hydrogen, there was already whole highly-developed system for production and distribution of electricity.
Also, you're mistaken about my "made up narrative". I'm not claiming electric cars were mass market, I'm strongly implying there were forces at work fighting against that very thing!
I was alive in 2003. There were no mass market electrics on the road. The RAV4 nickel-metal hydride plug-in hybrid from 97-03 sold a grand total of 1400 units. Nickel MH batteries were notorious for losing range quickly, having a memory if recharged frequently from only partial discharge, losing 20-50% of their charge per month on self-discharge alone, having far less energy density than lithium, only lasting for 500-1000 cycles etc. Electric vehicles only became viable with the advent of cheap lithium ion batteries due to mass market laptop and cell phone production of said batteries in the late-00s.
They succeeded where others failed because they are fun to drive.
There were no fun EVs prior to the Roadster. And the Roadster was a small production precursor to Model S, which transitioned from boutique-ish to mass production, and which led to the Model 3, and then the Model Y, the number one selling car in the world.
Until the past five years or so almost every other EV was still an oddball whose design language seemed aimed at screaming "EV" over anything else. Look at the i3 or the Nissan Leaf. Until Cybertruck all Teslas retained a fairly conventional appearance.
No they succeeded because of carbon credits. To this day, 42% of Tesla's revenue is just carbon credits.
That means that everyone who is buying a gas guzzler is helping fund Tesla. Tesla was one of the first to have an EV-only lineup which means they could sell 100% of their carbon credits. Every company that wants to sell a gas guzzler has to pay Tesla for carbon credits in order to do so
The roadster was a conversion of a Lotus Elise, they were still trying to figure out powertrain and battery back then. Still, reusing an existing chassis was a good strategy till they had more experience.
Tesla succeeded because it focused on the luxury market first by building the Roadster (and then later the model S). It succeeded because they showed that electric cars can be cool and not associated with lame-looking and performing Priuses and Leafs. It succeeded because people bought billions of laptops and cell phones powered by lithium ion batteries, which finally produced the economies of scale and had the right properties that made electric vehicles viable in the first place. Subsidies came later, and Tesla would have done fine without subsidies. Its the trad automakers that are attempting electrics that need the subsidies.
It succeeded because it was the only company to only sell EVs. That means everyone who wants to buy a gas guzzler is funding Tesla. In the past decade, over 40% of all of Tesla's revenue is carbon credits
> The RAV4 nickel-metal hydride plug-in hybrid from 97-03 sold a grand total of 1400 units.
FYI, it wasn't a hybrid.
And your statement is a bit misleading. 1400 sales sounds pathetic, until you realize that means they completely sold out. 1400 was all they ever made.
It was a plug-in hybrid. Which is why they later consulted with Tesla on an all-electric RAV4 in 2010.
1400 sales over 6 years is worse than pathetic. They didn't run out of materials to produce them. Good lord, this is Toyota we're talking about, they've manufactured hundreds of millions of vehicles. It was an utter flop.
They only made less than 400 available for purchase by the general public, which all sold out, and there was a waiting list for more.
You keep criticizing the sales, yet it was the supply that was the limiting factor. You can't sell more than you make, so of course tiny production runs are going to be "worse than pathetic" for sales!
Almost like they didn't really want it to succeed...
Nevertheless, Toyota sold less than 1400 of the plug-in hybrid RAV4s (they were NOT all-electric) over 6 years, so they ceased the model's run.
It still holds that NiMH batteries were not practical for EVs. They had terrible range, memory problems and needed replacement after just 2 years. Anyone who used a cell phone or laptop from the 90s or early 00s understands this: batteries didn't last, that's why they were often engineered so that you could replace the batteries easily. Compared to today's electronics like iPhones and Macbooks that have internal lithium ion batteries embedded on device. This is because they work for years and years and lose very little maximum charge over that tme.
It was a car engineered to satisfy California's short lived requirement for auto manufacturers to make a zero emissions vehicle, hence the availability. Despite that, drivers loved it, and didn't want to give them back when GM cancelled the program (after lobbying the law repealed).
The car was engineered with 90s battery tech so it was plagued with problems that anyone who used such batteries in the 90s know existed: high self-discharge, memory effect, low energy density, voltage depression over time, and limited cycle life. These cars wouldn't last 2 years without needing their batteries replaced. That's why they never sold more than 600 of them.
"Memory effect" in the 1990s is an old wives' tale. It's a real condition discovered in the 1980s on satellite platforms with computer-controlled charging, but was identified and fixed quickly.
It never existed in consumer applications of NiCd batteries, especially as late as 1996.
It was not an old wives tail. I worked in wireless retail 23 years ago and saw these problems first hand. NiMH phone batteries from that era would scarcely last two years. Of course, it mattered less then because the tech was improving so rapidly that most people wanted a new phone every 2 years anyways. NiMH was an improvement over NiCd, but it still had memory problems nonetheless in its first few generations (modern NiMH batteries are better at this).
It could be mitigated by fully discharging a battery before recharging, and I'm certain that in applications such as satellites , they engineered the charging cycles to mitigate this. However, consumers powering phones and laptops can't be expected to maintain such discipline. Certainly people driving cars over variable distances can't be expected to uphold such requirements either, out of absolute necessity to travel a fixed distance between charges.
Lithium ion ultimately won because it solved these problems altogether. Modern NiMH has caught up a little bit, but Lithium has meanwhile improved as well.
You realize the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crawler-transporter is a hybrid EV right? Along with most trains and tanks and ships. But I'm not compensating for anything, so a small vehicle that gets me from A to B quickly, quietly, cheaply, safely, and has a 6ft long bed with fold down sides works great for me.
Those aren't really "sales" numbers (tbh I'm not even sure GM "sold" any car either given that it was able to destroy all of them).
GM only produced 660 units and 457 units. They never tried to actually mass produce the car and seeing how current electric vehicles are I really understand why; why cannibalize your higher margin ICE vehicles?
This is basically the same argument people make about a cure for cancer. Since there's a ton of money in treating cancer you can't develop a cure and kill your cash cow. It however, completely misses that somebody that isn't currently treating cancer can come in and develop a cure (i.e. Tesla) without tanking their treatment margins.
The parent commenter to you never claimed that electric cars were already viable or mass market, I would say the implication is that it was very obvious to the car industry at the time that EVs would be viable and even affordable extremely soon.
The Nissan Leaf was only 7 years away in 2003. In automotive technology terms that's like a single generation's worth of refresh for a typical vehicle. The Chevy Volt also launched the same year as the first mass-market plug-in hybrid.
As an example, the current 2025 Honda Odyssey is essentially the same car that began deliveries in 2017 with only minor changes.
So really what we are talking about here is an auto industry that knew that EVs were going to hit the market, like, really soon. Nissan sold over 100,000 Leafs between 2010 and 2019 which is pretty amazing for a first generation mass market new drivetrain product.
No, the auto industry had been envisioning a switch to hydrogen since the 60s, but particularly in the 90s, tons of concept cars were pitched by various automakers, including Toyota and Honda.
Battery technology still sucked in the early 00s and it wasn't obvious yet that lithium ion batteries would lead to the first truly viable mass market all-electric cars. Easy to say in hindsight, but there were still many possible futures and the path that had the most research behind it at that point was hydrogen.
This just doesn't make any level of sense. Automobile development cycles are relatively long. Don't forget that the Volt debuted at the 2007 North American International Auto Show.
I have a very hard time believing that in 2003 nobody inside the car industry was thinking that lithium ion-powered cars were a more viable solution than hydrogen.
