Imagine waking up tomorrow in a world where electric vehicles (EVs) have always been the default.
For over a century, quiet, efficient, and mechanically simple electric cars have hummed along our streets. You plug your car in overnight at home, wake up with a full battery, and occasionally use public fast chargers during long road trips. Your car has fewer than twenty moving parts in its drivetrain, requires almost no maintenance, and produces zero tailpipe emissions.
Now, imagine an ambitious entrepreneur steps onto a stage, pulls a silk sheet off a brand-new invention, and pitches an alternative to your reliable EV.
“Presenting: The Internal Combustion Engine (ICE).”
The crowd leans in, curious. But as the inventor explains how it works, the excitement quickly turns to absolute bewilderment.
The Pitch That Would Get Laughed Out of the Room
If someone tried to sell society on gas-powered cars today as a replacement for electric ones, the pitch would sound like a dystopian satire.
Here is exactly what they would have to tell investors and the public:
- Controlled Danger: “Instead of a smooth electric motor, this vehicle is powered by thousands of controlled, tiny explosions happening right in front of you, every single minute.”
- Highly Flammable Cargo: “To keep it running, you’ll carry gallons of highly volatile, flammable liquid fuel in a tank strapped right under your passenger seats.”
- Atmospheric Poison: “It breathes out a constant stream of toxic gases—like carbon monoxide and particulate matter—directly into the air we breathe. Because of this, you absolutely cannot run it in an enclosed space like your garage, or you will die.”
- Extreme Mechanical Complexity: “Unlike your EV, which has a handful of moving parts, this engine has thousands. It relies on complex timing belts, pistons, and valves. Because of all this friction, you’ll need to regularly drain and replace its oil, swap out various filters, and take it in for frequent, expensive servicing.”
- The Infrastructure Nightmare: “Oh, and you can’t charge it at home anymore. We will need to build an entirely new, massive network of specialized, hazardous fueling stations across every city and highway on Earth to distribute this liquid fuel.”
If this were proposed today, the tech world wouldn’t just reject it—they would laugh it out of the room. It sounds inefficient, unnecessarily complex, and fundamentally hazardous.
Yet, this is the exact technology most of us drive every single day.
Path Dependency: The Power of “What Came First”
If the internal combustion engine is so logically absurd compared to an electric motor, why did it win the 20th century?
The answer lies in a concept economists call path dependency. This is the idea that the choices we make based on historical circumstances can trap us on a specific path, even if better alternatives come along later.
In the early 1900s, EVs actually competed head-to-head with steam and gas-powered cars. In fact, EVs held many land speed records at the time. But the ICE vehicle won out due to a few specific historical factors: the discovery of cheap, abundant crude oil, the invention of the electric starter (which eliminated the dangerous hand-crank), and Henry Ford’s mass-production techniques.
Once the world built roads, gas stations, supply chains, and entire economies around oil, society became locked in. Gas cars didn’t win because they were the superior engineering concept; they won because they got a head start. We mistook familiarity for logic.
Redefining “Normal”
This shift isn’t about nostalgia versus progress, and it’s not just about being eco-friendly. It’s a reality check on human psychology. We have a powerful bias toward the status quo. We look at gas stations and oil changes and think, “This is just how cars work.”
But innovation often requires us to take a step back and ask: If we were building this from scratch today, is this really how we would do it?
The transition back to electric vehicles isn’t actually a leap into some sci-fi future. In a way, it’s a return to the elegant, mechanical simplicity that made sense from the very beginning. The future is electric—not because it’s a flashy new trend, but because it’s the logical choice we should have been making all along.
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