The year was 2006. Electric cars were nothing more than vaporware, or just promising but limited one-off science experiments like the General Motors EV1 or Toyota RAV4 EV—and even those had been shelved years ago. The Tesla Roadster was still years away. Still, climate change was on everyone’s minds, as was American energy independence amid spiking gas prices and wars in the Middle East. A few players were still working hard on decarbonizing transportation in novel ways.
