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Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

I think you'd have to be a bit ignorant of very recent history to think that America is some cesspool of lack of innovation in the electric car industry. They invented it, despite there being no competition at the time.

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America certainly did not invent electric cars. Depending on which electric car you consider the first real one, the inventor was either French, British or German [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...

GP is talking about the current market and product class, not the drive train/mechanisms. There was ~a century where EVs were effectively nonexistent

If the GP was aware of the history of electric cars, they would have known how to word their comment to be factually accurate.

> "electric car industry. They invented it"

"Industry" is a keyword that your pedantry is overlooking. Unless you can edify us as to where there was an EV industry prior to Tesla? The existence or history of the tech is irrelevant in that comment.

The first automobiles were electric and they weren't American:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...

The most important component in an EV is the battery. The lithium ion battery made electric cars practical.

So you could say Sony invented the electric car industry by being the first to commercialize lithium ion batteries:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_lithium-ion_bat...

I suppose so. By that logic you could say that whoever invented the wheel invented the electric car industry. But I'd say it's definitely, overwhelmingly Tesla.

In “recent history”, America invented EVs, and there was no competition? What kind of revisionist crap is that? Or am I just misreading your comment?

Reference to perhaps GM EV1 in the 90s, and to Tesla which actually made electric cars desirable.

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