Simply Said, EV Sales Suck - What Is It Going to Take To Turn This Around?

Teslas sell pretty well because more or less they are closest to being a regular car.

No...they aren't. When the battery dies, it is sidelined.

"the prices are still prohibitive, the range is usually two to three-times lower than with a similar internal combustion engine and the recharge time is tremendous." Outside of that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play? For the vast majority of customers those negatives are deal breakers. It cannot be your only transportation, you have to have another car that doesn't have these negatives. And even then, these short comings limit its usefulness to a small segment of the market. Yes governments can insist on a certain percentage of vehicles be electric, but like prohibition, forcing them on people doesn't work.

What negatives? I'm reading these posts laughing. I can't go outside here for a minute without seeing an electric car. Not making a difference? Seriously?!

The Volt is my only car, it has no range or usefulness limits, it is powered by grid electricity 84% of the distance and 95% of the time. It costs 4c a mile to drive electric, it has not failed me yet, and it has had minimal maintenance and some suspension work under warranty (shoddy Daewoo parts). Oh and it has almost 37,000 miles on it, 31,000 are all electric. The estimated 1,440 gallons of gasoline saved by my Volt may be a drop in the ocean, but the $5,000 I didn't pay to the oil companies in the past 3 years certainly has made a difference to me.

I'm never buying another car without a plug and most likely the next one will be all-electric.

Really? You drive one so you know?

31,000 electric miles, $5,000 of gas I did not buy.

Three things:

price parity to a gasoline engined car

recharge time equivalent to a fill up

Going 200K miles without an issue as the Camry and Accord can.

EV's will be viable in 20 years.

Those are four things :)

-- price parity has been here if you consider the TCO;
-- when was the last time you filled up at Costco and how long did you have to wait? EVs offer a paradigm shift and charge overnight at home so you start every day with a full battery, no waiting. Some can also charge at work, still no waiting. On a long trip the Tesla Model S gets 200 miles of range in 30 minutes using a supercharger. In the past 2 years Tesla has built superchargers in over 100 locations in the US, a similar number in Europe, and starting in Asia, and the number keeps growing at an astonishing pace. Charging infrastructure by other providers also keeps growing;
-- mechanicaly EVs are much simpler than ICE vehicles and require much less maintenace;
-- viable today as shown by the hundreds of thousands of EVs on the roads.

"Global warming". LOL, after ALL that has happened, with the e-mail leaks and utterly failed predictions, I can't believe there are people who still believe in that B.S.

Air pollution, on the other hand, is a real problem. Shame EVs don't have the characteristics described by MDarringer above.

To tell you the truth, I could care less whether it's an electric car, a hybrid, a plug-in hybrid, diesel, etc. All I care is that more and more alternative energy cars are available (models and makes, note Porsche and Ferrari) and the die-hard petrol-only, manual only, V8 only, etc are having to suffer the pain of seeing these Jetson cars all around them.

There are 2 types of drivers:
1. People who drive to get from A to B
2. People who drive for the love "driving" (manual, sound, acceleration, handling, etc.)

Type 1 are probably more than 90% of drivers: they choose cars based on cost, reliability, efficiency, etc.

The Type 2 are a minority and driving is part of their lifestyle. So Type 2 could care less about what everybody else is driving. Just like some people go boating (also bad emissions) and off-road motorbiking, some people prefer the expense of crazy V8 manual only.

Right now, Im not sure if all the states have this deal, but here in SoCal, they are leasing Fiat 500e for $99 with $0 down..... I work at a dealership (not fiat) and 3 salespeople got them, and said when they went to pick them out. The dealer was selling out fast.

EVs may suck in the States, but Europeans sure love them.