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> 50+ years of manufacturers spending on R&D for internal combustion engines could have been spent on improving electric powertrain technology.

You're missing the point. This didn't happen because it wasn't economical. You're just wishing for fanciful things. You might as well just wish that CO2 weren't a GHG.

Consumer demand forced R&D into ICE instead of electric.

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Consumer demand is not, realistically, an isolated phenomenon, though. There's a tangled web of feedback in many directions among what people want to buy, what industry offers people to buy, what technologists are can work on, what R&D risks industry wants to take, and probably other factors. Advertising drives culture to some extent and reflects culture to some extent, not just one or the other.

The key point to figure out, I think, is so we know which lever(s) is most effective to fix the problem, rather than just assigning blame.

Sure, but demand drivers are usually pretty isolated. For commodities, like energy, this driver is price. People want cheap energy. And until recently, nothing could compete with dead dinos.

A large part of why it wasn't economical is that no one was being charged for the economic costs of carbon emissions. If combustion didn't have this massive subsidy, it wouldn't have been the more economical choice for so long.

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