Clearly there is a reason.
Even today, it's obviously true that EVs have major limitations. Limitations that were more pronounced before modern-day electronics and battery technology. I'm not sure if you could release a competitive EV in the 80s (for example).
The automobile industry has invested hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars into R&D for the internal combustion engine.
That said, there were definitely people excited about electric commuter cars and the big automakers were disdainful of them. GM's famous EV1 that they refused to sell (only lease) because they wanted the power to destroy them the instant the government got off their back about electric cars.
There was a missed market opportunity for a startup that did electric commuter cars in the 90s and 2000s. Maybe not a huge userbase, but very loyal. Of course a small company would face the same dealership franchise headwinds that Tesla had to fight and might not succeed, especially in a world with relatively little Internet connectivity and less comfort with shopping and buying online.
[1] https://innovationmanagement.se/2017/05/24/the-innovators-di...
That could have changed if society had (through regulations, subsidies or taxes) changed the rules, but it didn’t until fairly recently.
Even today, I haven’t seen numbers (but I haven’t looked hard, either) of _any_ manufacturer that shows they make a profit making and selling electric cars.
Tesla’s profits, for example, as far as I know, always were smaller than the money they get from selling regulatory credits (https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/23/teslas-sale-of-environmental...).
That’s society finally saying ICE cars must go out.
Government mills mill slowly, but I think many people underestimate how much they can accomplish in the long run.
They just don't ship them in volume because it's not yet profitable to do so. Whatever they produce of the Bolt, they sell. They just don't produce that many. Still, not as bad as some other companies, like Toyota, etc. that have only produced EVs where required by compliance.
Unlike Tesla, they don't have investors willing to take risky bets. They have to turn a profit and pay dividends. They're a massive multinational corporation that ships many multiples of the volume that Tesla ships.
When batteries get cheap enough and the supply of them reliable enough, they will be entirely able to supply any demand that is out there.
Doesn't look like Chevy actually makes the Volt anymore. Also, my point was that had they invested as much in EV as they did ICE doesn't logic suggest we would have had practical EV much earlier than 2011? Take this in the light of the actual article of this post saying that GM knew ICE automobiles were major cause in climate changing conditions.
And the GM EV1 was really the first modern electric car, produced in 1996. They killed it, and it wasn't great (NiCad batteries, weird design, etc.) but it predates anybody else's serious efforts, apart from some stuff in the 70s oil crisis that was built around lead acid batteries.
But basically GM started producing EVs as soon as lithium ion battery manufacturing chains made it possible. Thank Bob Lutz.
But I never said GM wasn't .. basically evil :-) Of course they're riding/pushing the ICE & petroleum wave, and pushing hard on it, that's what makes them money. Because for the last 100 years that's all that was practical, and it's what made them as a company. Boxes that burn dinosaur juice to move. But there was no battery tech until LiOn that could make EV feasible as any kind of alternative.
However GM's evil is subsidiary to the petroleum company's evil. Whatever bad GM has done, oil companies have done x 100.
The fact that 99% of Americans live within spitting distance of a gas pump that will fully charge an ICE car in under 3 minutes.
I would love to ditch my family's ICE car for an equivalent EV, but because we live in an apartment, and because my wife (who drives) does not work for a fabulously wealthy tech company that has employee garage chargers [1], we have nowhere to charge it.
As chargers are slowly getting better, and slowly proliferating into garages and parking spaces, and dedicated EV charging stations, this equation changes. But this sort of thing takes decades of effort, and trillions of dollars of capital investment.
The same way that it's been the year of Linux on the desktop [2] (for the past 20 years), every year has been the year of the EV. It's going to happen someday [3], but it's not going to happen quickly.
[1] When I did drive to my workplace at a fabulously wealthy tech company, it had twelve charging stations in a five-hundred vehicle parking lot. You look at that, and then tell me if EVs are ready for prime-time.
[2] Ironically, we've long hit, and passed the point where we hit the year of Linux in the car.
[3] Unless climate change (likely) or nuclear war (less likely) wrecks our civilization first.
Electric vehicles have no engine, and the entire drive-train is simpler, so it's now easier and more important to be vertically integrated (like Tesla).
Electric vehicles are projected to have far fewer costs per mile from service compared to ICE vehicles.[0][1]
I really like only having to worry about tires and windshield wipers (and other shared mechanical equipment at the appropriate mileage).
0. https://insideevs.com/news/340365/electric-car-servicing-cos... 1. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/12/does-lower-total-cost-o...
EVs are still not a slam dunk. Battery recycling is an issue. I’ve talked with people who handle car fleets and there are still other issues for them.
I look forward to these things being solved. I wish the innovation had started earlier so we’d be further along.
At this point what's not to like.
[1] Really they care about their trade balance.
They were to threatened by EVs that they had to spend lots of money creating some nonviable prototypes so they took people's attention away from the iable tech. All that instead of just investing on EVs themselves.