Despite being perceived as a late 20th century invention, electric vehicles actually predate the moving picture by four years. Thomas Parker invented the first commercially practical electric car in 1884 in Wolverhampton while Louis Le Prince showed Roundhay Garden, the first motion picture, to a Leeds audience in 1888.
The British quickly shovelled both successes out of the country so that Americans could become wealthy, of course, but curiously the two inventions took a while to meet. Indeed, the first big mainstream flicks to convince us that we might one day give up our addiction to burning the fossilised remains of ancient plants were released by the likes of Steve Spielberg, Ridley Scott and James Cameron in the later 1900s.
But how realistic was their portrayal of…
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