They are expensive, that's true, but the range is such a non-issue for anyone who can charge at home and drives a reasonable commute (i.e. doesn't need to stop to charge on their way home every day), and battery degradation is less than 2% per year.

> Let market forces decide, legislating what people ought to purchase is what is called a command and control economy and evidence shows that's bad

Equating regulation with communism is really tired rhetoric.

>I have an EV in Minnesota and it's great.

Today. I’m sure it is. That “big hit” you take in the winter, will only ever get worse. Eh, but maybe I’m wrong! Maybe I should change jobs.

Another reason is that if you design for the strengths of pure EVs, you can shift all of that weight lower and out of cabin and storage space, including offering new perks such as "frunks" ("front trunks").

A hybrid can't compete on cabin/storage space with a pure EV designed to be a pure EV, and can't quite compete on battery range.

All the MFGs know electric will be the future.

But, I’m working on truck stuffs for 2034, and guess what? ICE.

I’m sure some mfg was selling 10 year warranties on this gen 1.5 of EVs, and they will take a hit. Believe it or not though, the MBAs that pushed to market to bad fit consumers, yea, they know what they’re doing.

They will be good. They aren’t now. The entire market is cooling before it turns in to backlash.

>I'd be assuming the car manufacturing industry in the USA is fucked

Ha, well, I guess the most comforting thing I can tell you is that it’s OK you don’t know anything about how cars are actually made. It took Tesla a decade of building them and they still haven’t entire figured it out. No, automotive industry isn’t going anywhere. It’s got its own ups and downs and quirks, but overall we’ll be selling cars in 2050 no question.

20% at 10 years.

Back to the other topic, having owned a PHEV for more than a decade now, it's such an obvious compromise that doesn't make a lot of sense long term. It made great sense when I bought the car more than a decade ago, but today the weight carrying around a gas engine and gas tank would be so much better put to use on extra battery range rather than a gas engine you need a lot less often than you think you do. The only person I'd recommend a PHEV to is whoever I sell my current car to when there's a full BEV I want to buy. But I've also had years where I've gotten the "use it before stale" warnings where my only use of gas that year was because I had no other use for gas and my car suggests keeping the age of gas below a year old, and I recognize there are still a lot of anecdotal use cases of extreme daily/weekly/monthly mileage in the US that I cannot speak to.

I mean, I suppose it's possible there's some level of regulatory hurdle I'm not aware of, but it would seem to be a fairly obvious combination. Hell, AIUI most EV chargers still take longer than a gas pump does to "fill up" a car, so that would make it even more likely for the driver (and passengers if present) to hang about in the convenience store for longer and buy some of the stuff that actually makes the place money.