Elon Musk ehose name is an anagram for Lone Skum did not invent the electric car they already existed for many years before he started selling them
Someone showed me a car that they converted to an electric car which had multiple dar batteries that they said they would recharge in their garage once
Either they were pranking me or electric cars existed for a long time
I do not know enough about cars so they could have tricked me
But there were also remote control toy cars for several decades
@Zergling_man @shortstories there were EVs in the 90s but they were very much "compliance cars"/tech demos, along with the GM EV1 fiasco, and random guys building their own prototypes for decades when the batteries were lead acid.
Also back then: there was no issue of car companies using EVs as a trojan horse for everything you hate as a "package deal", they were literally like golf carts mixed with 90s cars tech wise.
@Zergling_man @shortstories also yeah the EV1 scandal made Elon Musk's tweets look like a joke to the point they made a movie about it (which had a sequel 5 years later with the early guys pushing EVs: Carlos Ghosn, DIYers, GM's CEO eventually warming up to them, and of course Elon Musk in his early days).
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/
The tl;dr: GM leased out EVs, when the program ends they get them all back and crushed most of them, sent a few to unis for experimentation, and then got mad when uni students tried to rebuild them as EVs. The tide only changed when one of the EV1s got dumped at some tow yard from some uni that forgot they had it, and a YouTuber's friend bought it as a restoration project.
Then GM realized again that the EV1 scandal was even worse for them than VW's emission scandal or Elon's Twitter behavior combined so they recently changed face and started supporting the project since they also realized they couldn't repo a car they abandoned legally, and it'd look awful during the big EV push to say they did all that in the 90s.
https://news.gm.com/home.detail.html/Pages/news/us/en/2026/mar/0311-ev1.html
It was so long ago and I know so little about cars I can not answer detailed questions about what happened. But at least I knew enough back then to know that I did not understand what I was being shown. Some really stupid people would just believe what he said because he told them so and believe they knew enough about cars to trust him.
