Have you driven a Tesla Model S?
I drove a friend's P90D, and I have to say it's one of the best "driving" cars I've ever driven. The steering is extremely precise, the throttle response literally demolishes any petrol vehicle, among other things.
edit: Canadian dollars and taxes. No we don't have EV rebates in my province.
They didn't go into this saying "We're going to design a new vehicle, but it has to be built using the same factories and tooling and processes we've poured a few hundred billion dollars into."
Also remember the large auto manufacturers have hundreds of millions of R&D sunk into internal combustion engines they still need decades to re-coup.
I got a tour of a massive OEM assembly line in the US this summer, and it was utterly jaw-dropping to see how many people are paid to do the most menial tasks possibly imaginable, that could easily be replaced by a robot. I was told the Union forces those jobs to stay, and they're actually the highest paid in the entire factory.