Vehicle and appliance designers like to sell their newly dreamed up wares as clean, simple and desirable (aside from those in the wayward and over hyped Steam Punk universe), easy on the eye and pleasing to the person in the street. So could the Sinclair C5 and a Tesla vehicle go head to head, 40 odd years apart? One design that arrived at the right time in history and one that clearly didn't.
But as an alternative view just imagine the C5 in late Victorian or Edwardian times (also imagine no cobbles but smooth roads and streets in those times) ... OK that's a rather large leap in imagination but if Nikola Tesla and Clive Sinclair had ever met up in a twisted warp of recent history; now there's an interesting sci-fi premise. Elon Musk could be scripted in as the eager if incompetent lab assistant who understands the magic of numbers and commercial persuasion better that the actual science. The typical maladjusted sideman/lab assistant trope really.
He's the one who steals the ideas and eventually takes them to market as the two old heads look on aghast but with a strange sense of relief. Eventually the leap in technology they unwittingly create with their inventions and Musk's sales techniques and vision usurps the US rail and oil barons and also undermines and removes the corrupt European monarchies and World War 1 is averted and a golden age of science and technology dawns.
Highways and bridges are built, electric airships and vehicles are commonplace and the oil stays mostly in the ground. The Titanic is still afloat and there's no Wall Street crash or Third Reich. There probably are a few other problems I'd imagine; Israel, Russia, China and Japan maybe? Oh and the the restless and down trodden Scots. We've still to conquer outer space though. This stuff just writes itself ...
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