Tesla didn't pioneer nor kick off electric cars. The only thing they did is market well. They are the kings of marketing.
Every major auto manufacturer is aggressively moving to electric vehicles because of the spark that Tesla provided. It wasn't the Nissan Leaf that caused BMW to freak out and radically alter their plans and move everything toward electric. The same goes for all the rest of the automakers.
It'd be like pretending the iPhone didn't set off the smartphone boom, because hey the blackberry existed.
My sentiments exactly, and I can't understand what you're trying to say here. You've defeated your own point.
Electric cars are as old as ICE cars (look up Baker Electric for one's). That's beside the point. What Tesla did was to produce an electric car that was truly desirable and from many metrics, better than an ICE car. You simply cannot deny Tesla's massive impact on the car industry, even GM have publicly acknowledged it.