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I was most impressed when the Secretary of Transportation tried to use the telephone system as a comparison. Consider the more than one hundred years of the history of the telephone: it started with dry cells and hand-cranked magnetos running over a single wire, with the return path through ground. Noisy, lossy, short-distance. Early switchboards were in the parlours of widows. Shifts in technology improved sound quality, and more importantly the range, until calls coast-to-coast became practical, with cross-ocean calls gaining ground shortly after.

Some of the first automobiles were electric. "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes." The early horseless carriages were pathetic by today's standard, both in range and in performance -- the electric car falling far short. The ICE version was an improvement, and further refinements continues to increase the utility of ICE-powered vehicles. (The racing circuit helped propel these advances.)

I will grant you that battery-powered cars have come a long way from the early electrics. But. The advances center around finding a lighter, safer energy storage device, which has been slow to come.

Let's give it up for the huge thumb of government on the scales in favor of battery-powered cars.

Remember the old joke? "I drove coast to coast in an electric care. It cost $5 for the electricity, and $3995 for the extension cord."

THAT HAND CRANKED PHONE????

I GREW UP WITH SUCH —ON THE KITCHEN WALL AT OUR DAIRY FARM IN SO WISCONSIN.

20 party line-—

A SPECIAL ring if you had an emergency-—EVERYONE was to ONLY pick up & listen—and respond if able.

Early switchboards were in the parlours of widows.

Or non-widows like my Aunt Bertha.

It was a big, ugly, multi-switched, multi-tentacled monster that was encased in beautiful quarter-sawn oak and just fascinated the heck out of me!