Fewer people are buying electric cars in the US

> If the government and automakers are serious about making transportation more sustainable, they should be incentivizing smaller vehicles, hybrid cars, and public transportation like trains and buses.

You can't really expect automakers to like trains and buses. This leaves us with government.

Smaller cars, hybrid are OK. Trains and buses work well hub to hub and inside large cities. They are not OK in the countryside where population is sparse. People know that and it results in people of large cities doing without cars and people in small cities owning at least one per family.

I didn't own a car 2012 to 2020 when I was living in a large city. I did 400 euro of gas per year for two years in a row and ditched my car when I had to pay a larger sum for a repair. Plenty of taxis fit in a 400 euro and we started to have fleets of rental cars that you can pick at the side of the road without reservation and notice. That doesn't work with low population densities.

I don't live in a large city anymore. Actually I live in a very small town and life here is unthinkable and unfeasible without a car.

So, ditching driving could work for most of the urban population but not for everybody in general.

I’d still buy considering they’re 1/3 the price of comparable western ones

Unfortunately EVs are still seen as a bells and whistles car, and carmakers are selling to that market.

This article is uniquely terrible.

"When automakers pivoted to EVs, they focused on the kinds of cars that were already popular — which meant a flood of big electrified SUVs and trucks. But massive-bodied EVs don't make much sense. Larger EVs require bigger batteries, which require more raw materials to manufacture, which requires producers to beef up their environmentally destructive mining operations. While bigger batteries allow drivers to travel farther between charges, they also make the cars heavier, more dangerous, more expensive, and worse for the planet."

WTF does the author think the ICE alternative is going to do better instead? Just as dangerous, even worse for the planet. You want to put in a paragraph in your EV article about how people are arms-race and status-seeking into bigger cars, fine, blame people for that. Don't blame EV's when this is what people want from autos anyway and of course it's easier for a new market entrant to get its foot in the door with the higher margin products. Every Model Y that isn't sold is a RAV4 guzzling 10,000 gallons of gasoline over its life.

> talks about range concerns as if they're simply incorrect

I think the quote you highlighted explicitly mentions that they meet the daily range needs but "struggles with edge cases like road trips because of the need to recharge".

> 93% of trips are less than 30 miles, but the vast majority of drivers take occasional trips that are beyond the range of an electric car. It's no wonder that 73% of drivers have range concerns-- no one is concerned with the EV getting through their commute, they're concerned with the EV getting them to their distant family / weekend trip / vacation home / etc.

Yah, policymakers should push PHEVs harder as an interim strategy. They can be effectively electric cars most of the time but have the versatility to make road trips easier.