In 1882, Edison opened Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan and started selling electricity by the meter. He built the grid, built the appliances that plugged into it, and then tried to build an electric car that would charge off the whole system. The car was never the product. The car was a device that generated demand for his platform.

The battery failed. Gasoline won. And for about a century, the car became the most personal object in American life. You chose the colour. You chose the engine. You turned a key and everything under the hood was yours. Plum crazy purple. Grabber blue. Chrome that caught sunlight and threw it back at you. Nobody was charging you a monthly fee to use your own heated seats.

Marc and Renee trace the full arc, from Baker Electric runabouts marketed to women in the 1890s through Spindletop and the Model T, the muscle car era and its death by regulation, the oil crisis that killed horsepower overnight, and the return of electric with Tesla and lithium-ion solving a chemistry problem that had been open for ninety years.

Then the economics. Dealer margins compressing from 4% to 2%. Software subscriptions running at 40% margins. BMW charging $18 a month to turn on a heating element already wired into the seat. Tesla selling acceleration boosts by removing software restrictions on hardware you already paid for. GM projecting $25 billion in annual software revenue by 2030. Edison figured out the model 130 years ago. The rest of the industry is just catching up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F Documentary about the EV1 for those interested.

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