Electric Cars Are Weirdly Skeuomorphic

Charging cables look like gasoline hoses — and that’s a problem

Clive Thompson
OneZero
Published in
9 min readDec 9, 2021

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Recently I was watching someone recharge their electric car and it struck me: It looks exactly like someone refueling a gasoline car.

They pulled their car up to the charging station, grabbed the big nozzle on the charging cable, lifted the cap on their car’s recharge…

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Clive Thompson
OneZero

I write 2X a week on tech, science, culture — and how those collide. Writer at NYT mag/Wired; author, “Coders”. @clive@saturation.social clive@clivethompson.net