I wouldn’t mind the idea of everything going digital. So long as we actually own the digital copies we buy. So long also as we are able to continually access said digital copies. We wouldn’t be having this physical vs digital debate going on for so long, if the practices of what companies like Sony and other media companies have been going about with handling digitally purchased content.
It’s a very stupid easy of a solution that has been continually fumbled time and time again. Because greed got in the way.
After the turn of the 20th, electric vehicles were still a niche novelty marketed exclusively to wealthy women. And at a time when women needed a man to open a bank account for them. If you were stuck marketing to women in 1908, its because you had literally no other market for your product.
They lacked the power or range to actually do anything meaningful. The internal combustion engine while noisy, smelly, dirty, and complex, was able to do actual work. By 1920 a whole trucking industry suddenly existed, tractors and industrial farm equipment were becoming common. Engines were doing things electric vehicles couldn’t begin to match for decades more.
Like I said, cheep oil from the ground is what made all the difference. If that discovery was 30-50 later maybe electric could have gotten a foothold and become something. But that’s only a maybe.
Any shenanigans the early oil companies did (and there was much shenanigans) was unwarranted. Even with a perfectly fair market electric vehicles couldn’t compete at the time.
By the way, this is comming from someone who’s been drooling over electrics since the GM EV1, and loves his year old Ioniq 5. Today electric is superior in every way. 100 years ago that just wasn’t the case.
Oohhh boy. Cheaper oil didn’t eliminate automobiles, profit motive did, which is the critical difference here.
The “shenanigans” you’re referring to was the systematic dismantling of a superior vehicle industry that threatened entrenched interests.
If we pretend you’re correct and gasoline was invented after electric vehicles, you’d still be missing the point of this post.
The question is which inventions users would appreciate more if they had been implemented correctly.
If oil barons hadn’t deliberately killed the electric car in order to protect their investment in and dedication to crude oil as a fuel, I wouldn’t mind automobiles so much.
Because industrialists did collude to block the development of the electric car, streets have been loud and dirty and motor oil has been poisoning the earth for a century when none of that ever needed to happen.
Cheep oil enabled the wide spread use of automobiles. I don’t know why you’d think anyone said it eliminated them.
Not what I’m referring to. See Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) for details.
My point is, at the time Electric wasn’t superior. It was cleaner, easier, and nicer to operate, but far less capable. Hense inferior at the time.
The first “Electric Carrage” was invented in the 1830s. The first mas market version in the US was in 1890.
The process for refineing crude oil into other products such as gasoline, was invented in 1891.
First: The electric was made my industrialists also. There were no noble “good guys” in this environment.
Second: My point again, is it didn’t matter that the oil industrialists screwed over the electric industrialists. Electric at the time couldn’t begin to compete with internal combustion engines.
Your “point” is that you don’t understand the question or answer.
Let me try to explain once more.
The question asks what do you wish was executed better so we’d have it today.
Your answer is early EVs at the turn of the 20th century.
My critique is that they executed as well as they could, it still wasn’t good enough.
Does that make sense now?
Your assertion rhat stagnant technology and unsustainable fuel is a better foundation for the automobile industry than dynamic, improvable technology and renewable resources makes the exact same amount of nonsense it did the first time.
The oil barons applaud your devotion to grime.
nope, not at all. read.
Then nobody knows what you’re talking about. I do it know what to say