If it's like my experience taking four years of French in high school, no one, not the teachers, not the parents, and not the students, were under the delusion that we'd be sitting down in a French cafe having in-depth conversations with the locals, or even that we'd find it useful in general. You could pass the class and check if off on your college application if you could write down that "bathroom" = "la salle des bain" on a test with being nowhere actually fluent.

This having a 30 mile range and probably taking hours to recharge, vs a Model T with 150 miles and minutes to refuel probably had a lot to do with it to.

House has been in the family for 50 years. The first 30 we had a mercury thermostat. It was still working when my parents ripped it out to put a digital one in, which needs new batteries every year and the unit itself seems to need replacing every five years.