Comment by ben_w

14 hours ago

Likewise, but those were famously slow. Might have been expandable into other delivery vehicles, but neither the batteries nor the motors were up to being commuter vehicles… well, possibly electric bicycles back then, the European Blue Banana* was better positioned than much of the world to commute by bike, but not much more than that in performance or geography until much more recently.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Banana

But they weren’t designed as a commuter car. THey were designed to deliver milk.

  • I'm saying they couldn't have been designed as commuter cars: "neither the batteries nor the motors were up to being commuter vehicles".

    Battery tech was way off on price/performance needed for commuting, until around Tesla happened: https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline

    IIRC, similar issues with compact powerful electric motors, but I don't have a chart handy for that.