In 1880, Manhattan's 175,000 horses dropped four million pounds of manure on the streets daily. Dead horses rotted where they fell. No one could imagine an alternative.

Then Bertha Benz stole her husband's prototype and drove sixty-six miles through Germany—fixing fuel lines with her hatpin, brakes with a cobbler's leather, electrical shorts with her garter. The world's first road trip. The world's first proof the automobile worked.

From there: Henry Ford's Model T and five-dollar day. GM inventing planned obsolescence. Robert Moses demolishing neighborhoods for highways. Ralph Nader exposing automakers who calculated that death was cheaper than safety fixes. Tesla rising from near-bankruptcy to trillion-dollar valuation.

The automobile promised freedom and delivered dependency. It solved the horse manure crisis and created climate change. Forty million people have died in car accidents since 1896—more than World War I.

Now the electric revolution is accelerating. For the first time in a century, we get to choose where the road leads.