THE TESLA KILLER.

Who needs a Tesla when you can have this beautiful Ohio Electric?

Readers more familiar with the back alleys of science-fiction subgenres will doubtless be able to tell Dr. Boli the answer to this question, but he suspects he already knows it: Is there a genre of “electropunk” alternate-history fiction in which electric vehicles like this elegant machine won out over their gasoline-powered competitors, and we built a world of quiet and fume-free streets and occasional catastrophic spills of battery acid?

. 2 comments.

Comments

  1. RepubAnon says:
    February 11, 2021 at 1:35 pm

    In Larry Niven’s “THE FLIGHT OF THE HORSE”, one of the stories included a time traveller who accidentally prevented Henry Ford from developing the Model T. As a result, the Stanley Steamers took over, and the future atmosphere’s CO2 level fell dramatically.

    The time traveller had to go back and fix history – humanity had adapted to need a high CO2 level

    Reply
    • Dr. Boli says:
      February 11, 2021 at 3:20 pm

      The Frick Car and Carriage Museum has a Stanley. There’s a video that shows the twenty-minute startup routine to get the thing going. Once the boiler was up to pressure, the machine ran like the wind, but one can see why the more or less instant starting of the gasoline-powered cars was a selling point. In the days when twenty miles an hour was a good average speed for most road conditions, the electrics were serious competition, too, but once the roads got better they could not match the speed of the internal-combustion cars.

      Reply

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