"The electric car is one of the ways carmakers expect to lower their average fuel consumption and get to the 55 mpg average. The problem is, people aren't buying, whether all-electric or plug-in hybrid.

General Motors is struggling to sell 10,000 Chevy Volts this year, and Nissan has sold just over 8,000 Leafs. For context, about 13 million cars are expected to be sold in the U.S. in 2011...

The bad news is that the technology is currently at a point where they have to make trade-offs," Giffi says. "So they want that same vehicle — they want it to look and feel the same. They also want it to perform the same."

Nobody is expecting those capabilities anytime soon."[0]

Nobody likes them, and for good reason. Teslas are cool new-ish technology and the best of the lot, and yet the range is still too low, the charge time is too high, the infrastructure will take quite a while to develop, and they're too expensive. They are the playthings of the Silicon Valley rich, but not practical for the everyday person, whose main purpose for driving a car is cheap and reliable transportation. Teslas and other electric cars are uncompetitive because they are too expensive for what you get, and the only way they become "competitive" is by artificially driving up the price of gasoline-powered cars and fossil fuels. They get a subsidy because they are ostensibly "saving the environment". As I pointed out earlier, the mining of the materials to make these cars (especially batteries) is an extremely dirty and energy-intensive process, mostly done in China by diesel-powered machines. Also, the cars are plugged into an electric grid which is run mostly on ancient fossil fuel plants[1] (as is most of CA's infrastructure), as hydro and nuclear have become basically verboten or phased out of existence. If being carbon neutral is the goal, driving your 20-year-old Accord into the ground would result in a fraction of the energy expenditure and emissions of having a brand-new car built.[2] Or, actually, a horse and buggy would be the most carbon-neutral solution.

Californians may marginally start taking less fuel intensive options in terms of transportation, but most people want to live in suburbs where they have a some room to breathe in their backyard, the schools are better, and a car is necessary---higher prices will effectively force them to spend more on fuel (at the expense of other things). The people in Marin County driving their Teslas and Priuses don't really care, but the lower-middle and middle-class gets clobbered by high energy costs (and has been leaving the state in droves, for that reason and others). And it isn't necessarily because transportation is more expensive; energy costs affect the cost of heating and cooling your home, the price of farming and delivering your produce, the cost of your clothing and smartphone, etc.! These sorts of regulations have led to the mass exodus of companies and jobs in manufacturing and heavy industry (which used to be the way many middle-class Californians made a living) to other states and other countries. Let's not forget that the least wealthy people are usually the least mobile as well.

Fossil fuels allow us to have an incredible standard of living. What if food, fuel, clothing, and transportation costs doubled or tripled overnight? This would certainly make the average person's standard of living a lot worse. And this is exactly what these foolish policies have accomplished and will continue to accomplish.

[0]http://www.npr.org/2011/11/21/142464818/can-electric-cars-he...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Cali...
[2]http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/aug/17/car-scrap...