Oh the electric cars we could have had!
November 23, 2007
In the early 20th century London was full of electric busses that soon went away, displaced by internal combustion machines. Why did they go away?
The Economist has a great article telling the story:
... ... Whether the fraud was truly a tipping point for electric vehicles is, of course, impossible to say. But it is a commonplace of innovation—from railway gauges to semiconductors to software—that the “best” technology is not always the most successful. Once an industry standard has been established, it is hard to displace. If Lehwess and Martigny had not pulled their scam when they did, modern cities might be an awful lot cleaner.