We've already forced people to cut down on their lifestyle choices in multiple markets in order to help them stop killing themselves and others. Smoking. Drunk driving. Trans fats. Seat belt laws.
Driving was the 12th leading cause of death, and 7th in terms of number of years of life lost, in 2011. This is a major health concern in the US. Is it worth it to kill 36,000 people a year so that they can have the "freedom" of a particular "lifestyle"? I'm sure those who own cars can rationalize it, but if we were talking about motorcycles they would probably be banned from public streets within a year.
There's certainly good to come from making existing choices less harmful, but in the face of no better choice, and the choice not getting any better in the perceivable future, removing the choice is often a good idea.
Moreover, this lifestyle choice has not only negative health effects, but actually lowers local economic activity, to say nothing of worsening income inequality, upward mobility, and debt. Even if you brought the cost down by half (which would seem incredibly odd to me, as you basically have only one or two providers of some of the essential parts needed, so why would they not charge the prices that the market already bears for these products? case in point: car prices have never gone down) you still have all the other negative aspects of cars - death, parking, traffic, pollution, inequality, etc. EV only solves one of those things. The rest have zero practical solutions.
You can also look at it this way: the technical progress does not stop just because cars are taken off the road. You can still improve batteries for a variety of uses, the existing tech is still documented and can be brought back, and when self-driving cars are stable, you can look at whether they are even necessary for auto-lifestylers with a well-funded national public transportation system. Certainly they wouldn't be needed in the numbers they are today.