Sure, but that was a completely different scenario. At that time only the very rich could afford a car.
And with the first generation Tesla's, that was also arguably the case. They've of course come down-market now into more affordable segments. This, the "rebirth" of the EV after its long hiatus.
Ford's Highland plant changed everything. But ultimately you are right; he used gasoline engines.
Yes, but he was not the pioneer of the gasoline powered motor car, he just made it affordable. Petrol motor cars, like the earlier and same period EV motor cars, were originally only for the affluent, and that's typically the case for any up and coming technology.
Point being: the motor car replaced the horse. What it was powered by initially, was in flux, with multiple drive options explored and the EV option pre-dating the petrol option. The modern EV is not to the petrol motor car as the petrol motor car was to the horse. It's a resurgence; a resurrection of one of the original motor car powertrains with a great deal of refinement made to it due to advances in motor technology, battery technology and electronics/software that make it a more viable alternative to petrol in many applications, not to mention the lack of tailpipe emissions. It is not a complete reinvention of personal conveyance that was the case when the transition from the horse to the motor car took place (the point I was responding to with my earlier post).
Somewhat O/T ramble:
When we transitioned from the age of sail, being at the mercy of weather, to the age of steam, this was almost as revolutionary as the transition from the horse to the automobile. I say almost because both still involve boats.
There is a tendency to over-state the magnitude or significance of a perceived transition and this is often not done to be disingenuous but rather because the person simply believes this to be true. I've seen people claim Moore's Law applies to solar panels and batteries because they don't
really understand what Moore's Law is. I've seen the claim that Wright's Law applies to SMR nuclear plants, as well as some perverted spin on Moore's Law. A $4bn 300MW SMR isn't an improvement over a $16bn 1,200MW "LMR", economically. There may be a case made for grid sizing, but plant CAPEX and OPEX don't scale up/down in-step with nameplate capacity. There is only so much simplification that can be done with traditional designs and a 300MW unit isn't going to require 1/4 the staff of a 1,200MW unit to operate. And then there's the great equalizer; the big wet blanket of regulation. We have VERY little experience operating any of the more exotic designs and there is a LOT of hype over fuel cycles that have a history of serious issues during a period where regulation wasn't even remotely close to what it is today. Water-cooled and moderated reactors won out because they were better, not because there was some grand conspiracy to prevent other options from being viable. Many of them were tested and simply proved to be inferior.
We've seen Wright's Law work for solar panels, but not for wind turbines, that have stopped getting cheaper and in fact have now gone up in price. This is because they are large and complex pieces of equipment that cannot be serially constructed and transported like solar panels can and, like with thermal plants, they attempted to scale up size to bring down cost, but this introduced more complexity and more problems, which delay projects, drive up costs and creates a negative image of the product (see:
Vineyard Wind).
They were replaced by ICE motor cars due to the inherent superiority of liquid fuels in providing longer duration mobility.
