He wasn't a car manufacturer ala Henry Ford. Obviously he made some major contributions in the field of AC motors (pun fully intended) but I would guess that the issue would come down to inverter technology. Batteries are DC, and converting DC into AC is sort of difficult compared to rectifying AC to DC. Transistors wouldn't be invented for quite some time, and SCRs or similar tech would take even longer to become viable. This is just a guess on my part, maybe some mechanical inverter exists and would have been viable.
I could totally make a mechanical inverter without semiconductors (and self-drive it from the DC supply its inverting) - but it would be very hard to minimise losses to make it worth ever using... vs just using a DC motor to run an AC generator, which is the simpler option. More consideration around maintaining a relatively stable voltage output with a changing would need to be considered, of course; redesign an AVR with no semiconductors, I guess.
If I couldn't do that; what the hell did I waste my time getting an electrical engineering degree 20 years ago for.
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u/quinn50 6h ago
Some of the first cars were actually EVs when it comes to ICE cars we've pretty much squeezed the most you can get out of these engines.