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What great innovations would have been made 60 years ago to the lead acid battery powered car that would have put them on par with contemporary ICE, to say noth

What great innovations would have been made 60 years ago to the lead acid battery powered car that would have put them on par with contemporary ICE, to say nothing of surpassing it?

Schiendelman 2y ago
The various players in the ICE and oil industries had a common practice of buying out battery technology developers or their patents to keep advancement off the market. Lithium ion batteries were first developed in the 1970s, and could have come to market much earlier if not for those practices.
beedeebeedee 2y ago
You're missing the point. We rebuilt the built environment based around internal combustion cars capabilities. Everything became single use zoning, so you need to drive from your house to the store, school, work, etc. None of that needed to be done (and has had severe impacts on our society across the board). If we had been limited to early 1900s electric vehicles, we could have stayed with more traditional mixed use city planning. Folks could still use cars to go where they needed, but even more importantly, they could walk! And for longer distances, take a train. Not only would we have been better off pollution wise, we would have been better off physically, mentally, and morally (not had to support middle eastern authoritarians).
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  > Everything became single use zoning, so you need to drive from your house to the store, school, work, etc. None of that needed to be done But let's not pretend that it was forced upon us. Most people liked their single-family suburban home in quiet neighborhoods without a lot of businesses nearby with their crowds, traffic, and noise. Nobody was ever prevented from continuing to live in their inner-city apartments, they just mostly prefered not to, when they had the choice.
  - beedeebeedee 2y ago
    Yeah, you're absolutely right. I'm pretty quick to demonize suburbs (and cars), but there were a lot of attractive things about them (and still are). We've had more than 60 years to live with them and it is pretty clear now what their problems are. I'd like it if we could move beyond them and bring back mixed use zoning as the default. My preference would be villages instead of subdivisions (i.e., clusters of housing and places of work with higher densities than suburbs, leaving the countryside intact, more like Europe).
bryanlarsen 2y ago
Without the gasoline car, we would never have built the interstate system. So imagine a world where a similar amount of money would have been dumped into mass transit instead of the interstate system. Imagine a world with high speed trains between major cities and EV's for local transport. For anybody not within 100 miles of a major city, they'd likely have gotten electricity earlier in a world which depended on that for transport. And stopping to charge for an hour every 100 miles is still a heck of a lot better than the alternative of a horse & buggy.
- tiltowait 2y ago
  I’m very possibly missing your point. If so, I apologize. But the interstate highway system was started in 1956, 11 years before Petris’ proposal.
- some_random 2y ago
  With the exception of additional money going to mass transit (which doesn't seem like a guarantee at all), that world sounds worse in every way than the one we ended up with.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Remember railroads of the day were all privately owned. There was passenger service between most major cities (at least where there was enough ridership to make it profitable) but that ended as people prefered the convenience of traveling in their own cars on their own schedules as opposed to waiting until tomorrow for the next train.

What great innovations would have been made 60 years ago to the lead acid battery powered car that would have put them on par with contemporary ICE, to say nothing of surpassing it?

Schiendelman 2y ago

The various players in the ICE and oil industries had a common practice of buying out battery technology developers or their patents to keep advancement off the market. Lithium ion batteries were first developed in the 1970s, and could have come to market much earlier if not for those practices.

beedeebeedee 2y ago

You're missing the point. We rebuilt the built environment based around internal combustion cars capabilities. Everything became single use zoning, so you need to drive from your house to the store, school, work, etc. None of that needed to be done (and has had severe impacts on our society across the board). If we had been limited to early 1900s electric vehicles, we could have stayed with more traditional mixed use city planning. Folks could still use cars to go where they needed, but even more importantly, they could walk! And for longer distances, take a train. Not only would we have been better off pollution wise, we would have been better off physically, mentally, and morally (not had to support middle eastern authoritarians).

SoftTalker 2y ago
> Everything became single use zoning, so you need to drive from your house to the store, school, work, etc. None of that needed to be done But let's not pretend that it was forced upon us. Most people liked their single-family suburban home in quiet neighborhoods without a lot of businesses nearby with their crowds, traffic, and noise. Nobody was ever prevented from continuing to live in their inner-city apartments, they just mostly prefered not to, when they had the choice.
- beedeebeedee 2y ago
  Yeah, you're absolutely right. I'm pretty quick to demonize suburbs (and cars), but there were a lot of attractive things about them (and still are). We've had more than 60 years to live with them and it is pretty clear now what their problems are. I'd like it if we could move beyond them and bring back mixed use zoning as the default. My preference would be villages instead of subdivisions (i.e., clusters of housing and places of work with higher densities than suburbs, leaving the countryside intact, more like Europe).

bryanlarsen 2y ago

Without the gasoline car, we would never have built the interstate system. So imagine a world where a similar amount of money would have been dumped into mass transit instead of the interstate system. Imagine a world with high speed trains between major cities and EV's for local transport. For anybody not within 100 miles of a major city, they'd likely have gotten electricity earlier in a world which depended on that for transport. And stopping to charge for an hour every 100 miles is still a heck of a lot better than the alternative of a horse & buggy.

tiltowait 2y ago
I’m very possibly missing your point. If so, I apologize. But the interstate highway system was started in 1956, 11 years before Petris’ proposal.
some_random 2y ago
With the exception of additional money going to mass transit (which doesn't seem like a guarantee at all), that world sounds worse in every way than the one we ended up with.
SoftTalker 2y ago
Remember railroads of the day were all privately owned. There was passenger service between most major cities (at least where there was enough ridership to make it profitable) but that ended as people prefered the convenience of traveling in their own cars on their own schedules as opposed to waiting until tomorrow for the next train.