Mexican government unveils a prototype for a new homegrown, ultra-affordable EV

A legacy of WW2 was the explosion of the whole defence industry. While a lot of the civilian factories got repurposed in WW2 to build trucks and planes and ships, the tech in all that stuff was very basic. For example the aircraft carrier Yorktown was "fixed" (at least good enough for the Midway battle) in 3 days. I somehow doubt a modern carrier could do that, simply because of the tech required. The US built 150 more carriers in the next 3 years.

The defense industry today gets a trillion $ a year. There's no civilian ship-building to speak of, and military vehicles are now highly specialized.

So why keep Ford et al afloat? Politically it's sold as "national security." In reality it's like more "they didn't die on my watch." And of course, having the ability to make local affects the supply chain. [1]

For example if China invades Taiwan, the US loses pretty much all electronics- especially PCs and Phones. That's a lot of leverage for a foreign country to have.

[1] US cars aren't really local - that's a fiction exposed by the proposed tarif on "car parts", which the industry squashed. In reality car parts are made all over the place (including the US) , and then assembled in the US (or anywhere else.)

* General-purpose Semis for commercial hauling. Yes, there's some EV Semis on the road today - pilot projects, or specific routes on specific schedules. But there's a lot of general purpose semi-hauling that happens every day on odd/long routes without sufficient chargers in the right places, and they need much bigger chargers. And then there's the specialty semis that carry large/wide loads. I see them almost every day in my area, carrying large chunks of power substations, heavy manufacturing equipment, blades for wind turbines, etc.

* Fire trucks, Ambulances, Tow trucks, Police cars - For various similar reasons, it's tricky with some of these, although in well-constrained cases and with extra vehicles on tap as backup (when the other one is low on charge in an emergency), maybe can kinda work, eventually.

* "Personal" trucks that see heavy towing/hauling use (think: hauling a livestock trailer or farm equipment or heavy materials (or maybe an EV race car!), possibly long distances on a regular basis). The battery range really suffers when you put all the extra weight and drag on by towing, and people aren't willing to turn what was a 5 hour diesel trip into a 9 hour trip with supercharger stops (more time in the heat with animals, more time on the road in general, and do you have to disconnect the trailer just to reach the charge cable?)

* Backup generator ICE engines - home, datacenter, industrial use, etc. The problem here is mostly runtime and peak watts of output vs cost. You can use a battery-based solution for most of these cases, but it currently costs prohibitively more for the same performance specs. When they're being used in austere environments, sometimes there's no electric grid to even charge from, so slap on a massive solar array cost, too.

* All military use of ICE engines in general (transport, generators, etc) - Not insignificant in scope and scale, and obviously they're not going to run EVs or find chargers on battlefields.

These cases will diminish over time, especially as we continue to make advances in charging and especially battery technology, but it will probably take a few decades because there's science challenges, not just engineering ones. The military case might never go away.

Yes, it has less utility than many other vehicles in many ways, but the bed length (5 ft) is longer than a lot of trucks I see on the road which enables carrying certain kinds of loads that aren't easy in cars or trucks with very short beds as seems fashionable now.

150 miles isn't a ton of range, but it's 50% more than a first generation Leaf and those sold.

The Slate clearly isn't trying to check all the boxes, but every vehicle doesn't need to try to do everything.

In the short term cutting r&d, killing off "not yet profitable" lines etc all lead to improved results this quarter. Who cares about 5 years, or 10 years from now?

If you look beyond the US then you see EV market share growing year on year. Yes, the US is resisting hard, but you can't hold back the tide forever.

Kodak invented digital photography, but kept going with film. In the end the world moved on, even if they didn't.

50 years from now ICE will be a niche market. And if US producers want to own that niche, well that's great. But it'll be a tiny fraction of what they are now.

Stopped reading here. For all intents and purposes this is not a real car, it's a golf cart. The title is complete clickbait.