Nick Pell

There's this idea that big oil killed the electric car.

And to be fair, there's some truth to that.

The oil industry did spend much of the 20th century lobbying against policies that would make EVs competitive.

Cheap gasoline infrastructure built around the internal combustion engine

and heavy investment in oil refining all created a self-reinforcing system.

This was not exactly a level playing field, but it's also not a mustache twirling plot so much as it's a case of technological and economic inertia.

Gas cars were cheaper, they were faster to refuel, they were more convenient.

Early EVs were limited by lead-acid batteries that sometimes barely got you across town before dying.

And when the hand crank disappeared and electric starters made gas engines easy to use, consumers overwhelmingly chose power and distance over quiet and clean.

By the time lithium-ion batteries arrived in the 1990s, the world had already spent nearly a century building around fossil fuels.

The infrastructure, the culture, the industry, these were all locked in.

And the 2006 documentary, Who Killed the Electric Car?, blames corporate and political collusion.

And it's not wrong, but...

The bigger story is that the technology simply wasn't ready yet.

The economics didn't favor it.

In other words, it wasn't just who killed the electric car, it was who failed to keep it alive.

The development of lithium-ion batteries is a big reason why we have electric cars today.

I doubt that lead-acid batteries are practical at all for automobile transport.

The comeback happens during the oil crisis of the 70s when the cheap oil part of the equation comes to an end.

Almost all of Detroit's development ends in prototypes that never get mass produced because, well, they're just glorified golf carts.