The way you get people to buy electric cars isn't by telling them they should or by taxing them if they don't. It's by making electric cars that are "better".
Agreed. Mandating anything for whatever reason only breeds resentment.
It's a long uphill battle to accomplish that in North America, however - especially with the mentalities we have here that make people honestly believe that they need a 1-Ton diesel dually to pull a box trailer with 500 pounds in it, or all the other fallacies about EV's that we've seen come out many times here in this very thread....
- That they don't work in the winter.
- You'll inevitably be stranded on the side of the road dead somewhere the first time you dare venture more than 20 minutes from your house
- Plugging in and charging every night is a "pain".
- That you'll need to replace the battery every few years.
The pickup truck crowd is going to be the biggest hold out as the "roll coal, yeehaw, electric cars are for liberal tree huggers, screw you, eat my dust!" crowd are going to take forever to come around. Until a pickup actually hits the market and starts destroying records and these misconceptions people aren't going to even
think about changing their minds, much less consider actually embracing things.
This is why I keep saying that the manufacturers really need to start focusing on the cost of ownership factors first, with performance benefits second - If GM (for example) put out an electric pickup truck tomorrow and said "It will go 300KM a day, every day, and every 100KM you drive will only cost you $2 in electricity instead of $15 in gas", it
will attract attention. If there's one that that pisses people off it's the price of gas and how much filling their tank costs them - naturally the larger vehicle segment is a natural for seeing very significant savings that will dwarf the "Buy an econobox ICE vehicle vs an expensive EV" ROI argument.
