EVs are actually very cheap as basic city car, but you have to leave out extra features like long range, bidicharging, heating...
Zero emissions means much smaller car, not some monstrosity like 3 tons SUV ls for personal transport.
I feel like the main issue with bidirectional adoption currently is the number of groups trying to maximise their profit, everyone wants a cut of the pie: the car companies, energy companies, ev charging companies, ev charging networks, solar/inverter manufactures and government standard groups. The needle won't move until California or other countries with influence force it. In Japan, from a technology perspective CHAdeMO has allowed for EVs to do bidirectional charging for years now.
Side note - I'm all for any extra safety features but I do find that a lot of the software driven features are poorly designed and implemented. I've had bad experiences with automatic braking and lane keeping when freeways driving where I was lucky to avoid having an accidents, so not being able to disable them permanently is a major annoyance to me. It seems like these features have very little real world testing.
Second is the deprecation cost on car battery! Cycles add up quickly!
1 USD = 1.5 AUD
1 AUD = 0.67 USD
Converting the price of Nissan Leaf to USD would be about $34,163 which is close to the prices listed on the Nissan website [0]
[0]: https://www.nissanusa.com/shopping-tools/build-price?models=...
But, nevertheless, the price of EVs is coming down. You can buy a Renault AMI for 10% of the cost of a luxury EV.
The other issue is that most people buy cars on finance. £300/month gets you a decent car. Same as most people pay £50/mo for their iPhone.
Do you get the analogy now?
But seriously, that's not a car. I own a Toyota IQ. Very small, but still a car. That's not a car, that's a toy. Not comparable to the cheap laptop, more comparable to a Nintendo DS or something similar. It works, but it won't let you email. Just like that "car" won't let you drive for a couple of hours on the highway without feeling you might die every moment.
(the underlying politics seems to be that the existing Western manufacturers are lagging deliberately, while the Chinese manufacturers are concentrating on delivering working products cheaply to consumers)
On the EV front we had the Ford Bolt and the Nissan Leaf, neither of which sell very well.
There have also been large supply issues, most of the battery refinement is happening in China.
If people would rather walk than suffer the shame of a small cheap car that's .. fine by me? Just make sure that the small cars "nobody wants" aren't carefully kept out of the market by tariffs and non tariff barriers to avoid people discovering that they do want them.
The leaf and bolt were already here in the EV category and they just don't get enough demand. I think they are great but they don't sell as well as you might think.
small cars are not popular, and large cars have much more aerodynamic drag and therefore require bigger batteries. Bigger batteries dramatically increase the cost of the car.
The fact remains, in the US market small cars are not popular. Its not a conspiracy of US manufacturers "lagging deliberately". There of course is more margin to be made on bigger vehicles but its a mixture of both consumer demand and margin incentives.