We should temporarily abandon car safety requirements, to reduce weight and complexity and get EVs to people earlier.
EVs due to their expense are being purchased mainly by the laptop-class, who work from home now. The production capacity would be better dedicated to the working-class who use their vehicles for transport daily.
Nothing says short-sighted like "we have a problem now, so let's create a 10-year scourge of death-traps."
Stuff like backup cameras weren't even brought into existence for many of the types of vehicles they find themselves in.
How many people are really sitting in the back seats of these subcompact cars and how many people is the back half of the side curtain airbag really gonna save?
As for bikability, I can agree with that, but again when you have the vast suburban sprawl that the USA has it's not safe to bike and even if it was everything is so spread out in places that biking isn't a good option.
It would very well work in most places with <20% own a car and using it. And in some rare case renting one.
Gyms would go bankrupt because nobody needed to go there anymore because they bike every day. But that would be an acceptable downside IMHO.
(I know what I am talking off. I work from home, but I bike to some shop, not even the closest one, every day to get my motion.)
How to get there I don't know. Europeans are not willing to do it. And Americans are decades behind with the development going into the completely wrong direction.
Sprawl does not make it unsafe to bike; it's a lack of safe cycling infrastructure that does that. It would take a small fraction of the space given to cars to make it perfectly safe to bike. Now as you also mention, sprawl may make it impractical to bike.
That said... the distances between things in suburbia are often artificially inflated as well. This 21-minute walk to a grocery store near where I used to live could be cut down to maybe two minutes if you were to take down the fence blocking it off:
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/funeral-today-for-danie...
Private mass-transit using autonomous busses and auto-routes, where passengers can rate eachother, is a better solution.
Rating each other is highly discriminatory: I have an Asian friend and she complains that she never gets decent places on Airbnb.
At $7.25 a gallon over the lifetime of the vehicle, you're going to pay more than the sticker price of the car in fuel for a good majority of vehicles.
Unless you have incredibly expensive electricity in your city, you're probably looking at over $30,000 in savings over the life of the vehicle. Subtract $30K from the price of an EV and those prices look pretty good...
Yep that's a sure fire way to solve the battery supply constraints...
You can't magically create more cars out of thin air. Every EV manufacturer is currently running at capacity.