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Comment by twiceaday | Hacker News Reader

I'm no Elon defender but do you think there would be so many good Chinese EVs today if Elon was never born?

I mean, yes, probably? The Nissan Leaf came out before the Tesla Model S, and the Renault Zoe at about the same time (after, particularly in the Zoe’s case, many years of knocking around as concept cars). VW e-Golf shortly after. This was all a consequence of a combination of li-on batteries getting (just) good enough and government subsidies (California and half of the EU were all but begging the manufacturers to make electric cars, for years); once those conditions were met, about four or five manufacturers launched entrants within a year or so of each other. The Leaf and Zoe are far more archetypical electric cars than the Model S; Tesla’s first truly mass-market car, the 3, didn’t come out til years later.

An idea that Tesla in some sense invented the modern electric car become popular later (probably driven by strength in the US; the Leaf and Zoe were not particularly US-market-friendly cars, and the Zoe was never even released there), but it’s kinda ahistorical.

Teslas were the first "normal" electric car. From the beginning they performed well and looked good. And though range maybe wasn't great at first, it was still better than anyone else, by a lot.

Leaf was a nerdy glorified golf cart, like all other EVs before it.

Hype aside, Tesla showed the market that you didn't have to look like a dweeb driving an electic car.

And no, I don't own a Tesla, and would not own one, but I give credit where it's due.

The e-Golf was more or less literally a Golf with a different engine. The Leaf was a fairly normal hatchback, very similar to other hatchbacks popular in Europe and Asia. Tesla’s first ‘normal’ car was the model 3 (the S was too high-end/expensive to qualify), which came far later than either.

Actually, I think one lesson to the manufacturers from the first-gen was that you shouldn’t make electric cars too similar to normal cars. The e-Golf, in particular, people often didn’t realise it even existed. Second-gen electric cars like the i3/4 and Hyundai Ioniqs are notably weirder-looking than the first gen.

(Again, I do think that for America specifically the early electric cars were not well-targeted, which was more or less inevitable; the US is a more difficult market than Europe or China due to the range requirements, and also a much smaller market for electric cars than either.)

I was actually thinking of the Roadster. Based on a Lotus Elise. It looked good, it was thrilling to drive. It totally broke through the lines people had drawn in their minds around the idea of what an electric car could be.

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