This is really divorced from reality. There was just no way at all that electric cars would've been viable in the 20th Century. No, we wouldn't magically have developed modern computer-controlled battery packs of lithium ion batteries in 1920 if we just wanted it hard enough.
I'm sure the performance wouldn't have been comparable to modern electric cars, but what if car companies in 1920 had focused on producing electric cars that had a shorter range with a lower top speed?
It's not like people were commuting 60 miles each way on highways in 1920, and I doubt model t's were actually normally hitting their theoretical top speed anyway.
> I'm sure the performance wouldn't have been comparable to modern electric cars, but what if car companies in 1920 had focused on producing electric cars that had a shorter range with a lower top speed?
They'd have been outcompeted by the cars with longer range and higher speed (and no reliance on lead acid batteries that must have horribly degraded with intensive use), just like they were in the 1910s. It's not like they weren't tried: the tech had a longer history than the ICE and they actually outsold the ICE in the US in the first decade of the twentieth century
>No, we wouldn't magically have developed modern computer-controlled battery packs of lithium ion batteries in 1920 if we just wanted it hard enough.
That's not what the commenter said. Don't put your interpretation of the words into theirs.
It is very feasible that the investment of 100-some-odd years of battery research and a marked non-future invested as deeply into oil and gas as we have now would have rendered our entire world vastly different. This is not a claim that the future would have happened sooner, but rather the events that unfolded and the research would have been different.
