The first false start
1996 · General Motors EV1
The EV1 was the first modern production EV — a two-seat aluminium-bodied coupé with a 137 bhp AC induction motor, a 16.5 kWh lead-acid battery (later 26.4 kWh NiMH), and an EPA-rated range of 80-100 miles. GM built around 1,100 examples between 1996 and 1999, leased only — never sold — through Saturn dealers in California and Arizona, in response to the California Air Resources Board's 1990 Zero Emission Vehicle mandate.
The EV1 worked. It was quick (0-60 in 8.0 seconds), quiet, and surprisingly drivable. The lessees — a small but vocal group, mostly West Coast environmentalists — loved them. Range was real-world adequate for commuting. Charging was via a paddle-inductive system Sumitomo had developed, capable of 6.6 kW from a 240V supply.
In 2003, GM cancelled the programme, recalled every leased EV1, and crushed almost all of them at a desert facility in Arizona. A handful survived — donated to engineering schools as static exhibits, mostly without working drivetrains. The decision was, internally, justified on commercial grounds: GM said the leases were unprofitable, replacement parts would be unavailable long-term, and the technology had no path to mass-market profitability. The lessees, in the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006), said the cancellation was political — pressure from oil companies, the Bush administration, and GM's own internal combustion-engine division.
Both narratives are partly true. The EV1 was, by every measure available to a 1999 GM accountant, a money-losing project that nobody outside California cared about. It was also, in retrospect, the most prescient car GM has built in the last 50 years.
The second false start
1996-2003 · The conversion era
GM wasn't alone. Through the late 1990s, half a dozen manufacturers built short-run electric versions of existing petrol cars to comply with the same CARB ZEV mandate that had created the EV1.
Ford built the Ford Ranger EV (1998) and the Th!nk City (2002). Toyota built the RAV4 EV (1997) — mechanically the most successful of these, with a NiMH battery that proved durable enough that some examples are still on the road in 2026. Nissan built the Altra EV (1998). Honda built the EV Plus (1997).
All of these were small-volume, lease-only programmes, sold or leased into California in single-digit thousands per model. All were withdrawn by 2003. Like the EV1, they were victims of a regulatory environment (the ZEV mandate was weakened in 2001 in response to manufacturer lobbying) and a technology stack (NiMH batteries were too heavy for cheaper cars, lithium-ion was still too expensive).
What this generation did prove was that the supplier ecosystem for EVs — battery management, motor controllers, charging hardware — could be built. AC Propulsion in California, founded by ex-EV1 engineers in 1992, supplied drivetrains to Nissan, Toyota, and (eventually) Tesla. The companies that survived this period — A123 Systems, Aerovironment, Magna — would go on to supply most of the EV industry's components when the second wave arrived a decade later.
The third attempt
2010 · Nissan Leaf (Mk1) / Mitsubishi i-MiEV / Chevrolet Volt
The first wave of mass-market EVs from established manufacturers arrived in 2010-2011. The Nissan Leaf launched in December 2010 with a 24 kWh lithium-ion battery and 73-mile EPA range — the first EV designed from the ground up as a mass-market product, not a compliance car. Mitsubishi launched the i-MiEV slightly earlier (June 2010 in Japan), and Chevrolet's Volt (2011) was a plug-in hybrid using EV technology in a different package.
The Leaf in particular was a serious commitment from Nissan. CEO Carlos Ghosn had publicly bet the company's future on EVs — Nissan invested approximately €4 billion in Leaf development, including a dedicated battery factory in Sunderland and motor production in Yokohama. By 2015 the Leaf was the world's best-selling EV, with around 200,000 cumulative sales.
The first-generation Leaf had three problems that made it a transitional rather than transformative car:
Air-cooled battery. Nissan used passive air cooling on the battery pack to save cost. The pack heated up under fast charging, lost capacity in hot climates (notoriously, Phoenix Leafs lost 30%+ capacity within five years), and degraded faster than the warranty assumed.
Range was too short. 73 miles in EPA testing meant maybe 55-60 in real-world UK winter use. Adequate for commuting; useless for any longer trip without intermediate charging — and the public charging network in 2011 barely existed.
Charging was 50 kW maximum. A Leaf at a 50 kW DC fast-charger could add about 100 miles of range in 25 minutes. That sounds workable until you've actually tried to do a 200-mile UK motorway journey, where you'd need three charging stops in cars that took 25-30 minutes each to charge — turning a 3-hour journey into 5 hours.
By 2015 the Leaf was clearly going to be replaced by a better EV. The question was who would replace it.
The version that made it stick
2012 · Tesla Model S
The Tesla Model S launched in mid-2012 — a full-size aluminium-bodied saloon with an 85 kWh battery, 265 EPA-mile range, 416 bhp (Performance), and a $77,400 starting price. Compared to the Leaf, it had three meaningfully better specifications:
Liquid-cooled battery. Tesla had hired ex-AC Propulsion engineer Andy Frank's research group at UC Davis to design a liquid-cooled pack, with thermal management that kept individual cells within 2°C of each other. The pack lasted, durability-wise, in a way the Leaf's pack didn't.
Real range. 265 miles EPA was real. A Model S in 2012 could do London to Manchester without stopping, in winter, with the heater running.
A charging network. Tesla started building Supercharger stations in 2012, in parallel with car launch. By 2014 there were 100 Supercharger sites in North America and 50 in Europe, each capable of 120 kW DC charging. A Model S could add 170 miles of range in 30 minutes. The 200-mile UK trip became one charging stop.
The Model S also benefited from features the established manufacturers underestimated. Over-the-air software updates. Direct-to-consumer sales (no dealer markup). A simple two-trim option list (RWD or AWD; standard or extended range) versus the bewildering option matrices of European premium cars.
By 2015 Tesla had sold approximately 100,000 Model Ses worldwide. By 2020, the Model S had been outsold by the Model 3 (a smaller, cheaper saloon launched 2017) and the Model Y (an SUV, 2020), and Tesla had become the world's most valuable car company by market capitalisation.
The Model S didn't make EVs viable. It made buying an EV the rational choice for some people, on its own merits, without the environmental argument.
The mass-market crossover
The shift from "Tesla and a handful of compliance cars" to "every manufacturer has competitive EVs" happened between 2019 and 2024, faster than almost any precedent in automotive history.
Volkswagen ID.3 (2020). First mass-market EV from a legacy manufacturer that genuinely competed with Tesla on the same terms. 58 kWh battery, 263 miles WLTP range, £30,000 starting price. Production was bumpy — early ID.3s shipped with software bugs that took two years to fix — but by 2022 the platform was solid.
Hyundai Ioniq 5 (2021) and Kia EV6 (2021). Both built on the E-GMP 800V platform, both capable of 350 kW DC charging (10-80% in 18 minutes), both genuinely better than equivalent Tesla products on charging infrastructure. By 2023 the Ioniq 5 was outselling the Model Y in several European markets.
BYD's global expansion (2022 onwards). Chinese manufacturer, vertically integrated battery production (BYD makes its own batteries), aggressively cheap. The BYD Atto 3 (2022) and Dolphin (2023) became the volume EVs in Europe by 2025, often undercutting equivalents from established manufacturers by 30%.
By 2025, Tesla's UK market share in EVs had fallen from 75% (2018) to 18% — not because Tesla had got worse, but because every other manufacturer had finally caught up.
What actually changed
The viable EV required four things to all happen at once: lithium-ion battery cost falling below $200/kWh (achieved by Tesla in 2014, by everyone else by 2018), DC fast-charging infrastructure (Supercharger 2012, then CCS networks 2018+), home charging hardware standardisation (Type 2 plug, mandated EU 2014), and software that was actually any good (Tesla 2012, then Hyundai/Kia 2021).
The manufacturers that delivered all four first, won. The manufacturers that focused on the car part and underestimated the software and charging parts (Volkswagen 2020, Toyota 2022) launched first-generation cars that needed two years of post-launch software updates to be competitive.
That's the lesson the EV transition has actually taught: the car itself is no longer the hardest engineering problem. Battery chemistry, charging networks, and software are. Manufacturers built around the assumption that the car was the hard part are the ones being out-competed by manufacturers — Tesla, BYD, Hyundai-Kia — built around the assumption that everything else is.
The next stage
The next decade is about charging time, not range. Most modern EVs have enough range (250-350 miles) for any plausible private-car use case. What they don't yet have is charging speeds equivalent to a 5-minute petrol stop. The current best — Hyundai's E-GMP 800V at 350 kW — does 10-80% in 18 minutes, which is close to but not quite parity with a petrol fill-up.
The 800V platform is rolling down to cheaper cars. Renault's R3 (expected 2027) will be the first sub-£25,000 car with 800V architecture. The new Polestar 5 (2024) and the upcoming Audi A6 e-tron (2025) are pushing 350-400 kW peak charging.
Once charging time is solved — probably by 2030 — EVs become unambiguously easier to live with than petrol cars in any urban or suburban use case. The viable production EV that began in 1996 with the EV1 will, finally, be the default car.