Side Note

Electric cars were cooler in the ’70s

If you are a dad, or at least know a dad, you may have heard of a car company called Tesla, run by a man named Elon Musk. Hahahaha just kidding, Elon Musk is basically the only thing the internet ever talks about any more and he will never get off the internet and just go live in a secret doomsday bunker at the bottom of a floating city like a normal tech billionaire. Only days after he very publicly (and unhelpfully) inserted himself into the rescue of the Thai soccer team from a cave and then got called out for donating the equivalent of many people’s annual salary to Republican political campaigns, dang Elon Musk is in the dang news again for being super behind on fulfilling orders for the Tesla Model 3, causing an estimated 24 percent of Model 3 customers to cancel their orders for the $35,000 electric vehicle.

Not to be “that guy” or anything, but why does it take so long to make an electric car? It’s not that hard, dude! I know that if Elon Musk sees this he’ll probably let his Twitter fans loose on me by calling me a dishonest, lazy journalist and then make some unverifiable claim about how many orders Tesla has coming in or whatever, but we have literally had electric cars since the ’70. Elon Musk is not reinventing the wheel here, he’s just commercializing a thing that many other people have already done.

Anyways, here are some extremely cool pictures of electric cars from back in the day. They look more futuristic than Teslas, and unlike the Model 3, the people behind them actually made as many of them as they were supposed to. (To be fair, unlike Tesla, these people only needed to make a handful of electric cars, but still. Life involves managing people’s expectations, y’know?)