Sure, there were electric cars. But if I remember correctly, Tesla was the first to deliver the whole next-gen package with an every day, everywhere car, plus charging stations plus the whole automation. If you wanted that, there was no way around Tesla for quite a while.
Modern browsers happily show you the actual characters, while sending their encoded entities to the server. So, from a user perspective there is no ASCII limitation. Case in point: söhne.at (just some random website, I have no idea what they are or if they are legitimate)