The term electric vehicle can broadly apply to everything from a boat to a bike to an aircraft, so long as the vehicle

in question is propelled by electricity rather than the wind or coal or petroleum or some other

power source. An EV automobile, EV standing for electric vehicle, typically refers to a car, a truck, or something

in between, like an SUV or station wagon or crossover vehicle. There are all sorts of terms

for the different form factors that are popular in a given decade, but rather than referring to

all types of transportation,

including things like buses and trains and zeppelins, EV automobile typically means something

driven on a road, typically for a relatively small number of passengers, one to a half

dozen maybe, though you could conceivably carry more than that if you

had to. And you can in some cases carry a very large non-human load of cargo if we include

large electric trucks in this definition. And we often call those trucks semis here in the United States.

So we can include electric semis in this category as well

if we choose to, and for the purposes of this episode, I will be doing exactly that. Vital EV technologies

were originally developed and patented in the 1840s, but mass-produced electric vehicles

didn't hit the streets until the early 1900s when the Studebaker automobile company

in the United States started churning them out in 1902.

Though two years later, that same company also started producing gasoline-powered cars, and that

shift was in line with a larger shift in the American automobile industry, which saw Ford,

and then eventually other companies as well, mass-producing gasoline-powered cars, which made them cheaper and more widely available,

and thus that mode of locomotion became dominant, though that wasn't the only reason

electric cars didn't take off at that point in history.

The batteries that existed at the time were fairly abominable in terms of storage, and they

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