Taxpayer subsidized early adoption.
If the taxpayers are cool with it, then it's no problem.
Often the voters that push for more spending are the people who pay little taxes, while the voters who oppose more spending are the people who pay lots of taxes.
But hey, when did a voter ever dislike paying for something with OPM?
EVs make more sense, I think, in Europe, where most cars are small and Diesel now, and distances tend to be shorter*. They burn dirty Diesel also. Then they have these 50 cc scooters that pollute like crazy.
Their air pollution often is really bad.
*They use a funny kind of mile that isn't a mile at all, only about 60% of a mile....
Well, I do think that the way most Europeans live is a lot more localized and with smaller distances to be traveled on a daily basis.
But at the same time, most American life is pretty damn localized and there aren't long distances to be traveled on a daily basis. 80% of the US population live in urban areas (which I assume includes suburban and possibly even exurban).
But usually the issue is that a car is a very major purchase, and we tend to make those purchases partially on "what do I do 95% of the time?" but also "what do I need to be CAPABLE of doing the other 5% of the time?"
I think for most potential EV purchasers, they are scared an EV won't work for that 10%. Whether that's a road trip, or whether that's towing, or whether that's range anxiety in the coldest 2 weeks of winter.
It's why a lot of multi-car EV families have one BEV and one ICEV. The BEV is great for around-town stuff, and maybe could even be the majority of the family's miles driven. But they like to keep the ICEV (whether it's a truck, or used for road trips, etc) for the times when the BEV might be inconvenient.
In our family, EVs hadn't been mature enough yet when my wife got her RX350, but with our current lifestyle, a BEV makes perfect sense for her. She does the majority of her driving to/from work and running errands and would basically never have any problem with range. With home charging she'd never have to visit a gas station again. And then with me having the Ford Flex (and the Jeep), we'd have an ICEV with plenty of seating that could handle any time we need to take the kids somewhere, or any time we need to road trip. Since I primarily WFH with limited days in the office, our total familial gas consumption would DRASTICALLY drop if she was driving a BEV. When it comes time to replace her RX, it might be with an RZ. Granted that's probably 5+ years from now.