The withering dream of a cheap American electric car

Electric cars will not "save the environment".

Their purpose is to "save the US automotive industry".

The idea that billionaires and car manufacturers would be motivated by anything else is laughable.

Support public transportation.

As somebody who wants less cars and more public transportation, I think your messaging is way off.

This is an all-hands-on-deck situation where we need to pursue all options simultaneously. And there are huge swathes of our country that we will not be able to transition out of suburban sprawl into transit-friendly planning in the necessary amount of time.

So in 2050, there will still be cars, and we can not build enough public transportation in time to solve climate change (and in fact we won't transition to EVs fast enough to solve climate change, if we rely on EVs alone either...)

Maybe if domestic automakers fall to Chinese competition, the US will start properly investing in public transportation like it did a century ago.

No, wrong. Completely wrong. The US auto industry doesn't believe EVs will save them--they're certain it's going to kill them or almost, but the EV transition is being forced by CARB + ROW (Europe, China and Korea) which don't really give a shit whether the US auto companies like it or not. They will chase China and Korea or die. It's really that simple and has nothing to do with what they want and entirely what they're forced into by global competition and regulation.

Co-signed. One really concept is the locked-in demand: every single internal combustion vehicle sold now means someone is buying gas for at least two decades, but even if you use entirely coal power an EV will generate fewer carbon emissions now and that will drop rapidly every time cleaner power is added to the grid.