Originally published at: We had electric cars in 1900... Then this happened - ethical.net
Tearing through the crowded streets of Philadelphia, an electric car and a gas-powered car sought to win a heated race. One that mimicked cars’ actual use: they had to stop at stop lights, wait for pedestrians to cross the street, and swerve in and out of the hundreds of horse-drawn buggies. That’s right: horse-drawn buggies…
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As the article says, Tesla was very far from the first company to bring electric cars to market, but they were the first to actually make them a ‘thing’, Apple were a million miles away from being the first company to make a portable MP3 player, but it was the iPod that made them explode.
On some level all of the history doesn’t really matter, what’s important is that someone made it a big thing, and started the race between the more ‘traditional’ car makers to grab slices of that market.
It’s also true that changing every car in the world to be electric isn’t going to solve anything until we also make the necessary changes to ensure that all of the electricity that they are using is generated from renewable sources.
Hey John, have you seen Who Killed the Eclectic Car? It’s a documentary you can find on YouTube these days. The electric car has been heavily sabotaged since its inception, sometimes by its own creators (see the GM’s EV1 discussed in the essay). Yes, the sources of the electricity they use is important, but the conversation around the resources for the batteries is becoming mainstream and we’ll write about it soon 
No, I haven’t watched it, but will add it to my list