When electric cars were novelties

As a youngster in the mid-2010s, I thought that electric cars were some new-fangled inventions that came from books from the nineties that didn't have the range or otherwise weren't very powerful. In those days, electric cars (and other electric vehicles) were not nearly as advanced as they are now. I had ridden on electric vehicles a few times, specifically riding on the Centrelink, the ill-fated electric free bus service that once connected the Broadmarsh and Victoria shopping centres in Nottingham, as we weren't familiar with the streets. However, I thought that electric cars, and other alternatively powered vehicles, couldn't really challenge conventionally powered vehicles.

In those days, probably the only charging station I knew of was up at Holywell Park, and it was where these photos were taken in July 2014. The parked car is a first-generation Nissan Leaf, a weird-looking hatchback with, apparently, an only eighty mile range; owned (at that time) by Cenex, a company based in Loughborough specialising in zero-emissions vehicle research, as indicated by the logo and the 'vanity' plate.

Things have changed a lot since then; the proliferation of electric vehicles has advanced rapidly in the years since then.