Let's be honest, EVs were never as popular before Teslas came along. GM completely scraped their Lease-Only model. Toyota mostly sold their early EV RAV4s to industrial plants, where they were a miserable failure. As I well know from personal experience. Nothing like charging one up literally all night, taking it out; and then having it completely die on you! Literally every part of the vehicle. I'll even name names. Giant Con-Ed complex in Astoria NY. Along with the much smaller New York Power Authority (NYPA), literally next door on the same huge plot of land.
Before Tesla, BEVs were
compliance vehicles, grudgingly produced to meet a mandate that the industry's lobbyists worked overtime to steadily water down to the point that in many states they could give them to employees to drive or lease them to .gov agencies for a pittance. The fact that the first-generation RAV4EVs were sold at all once the leases ended was of itself surprising given their blah reception and the relatively short lifespans of their battery packs.
There's a reason why they switched over to Toyota Prius hybrid sedans as company transportation vehicles. Much more reliable.
As the experiments of ~20 years ago with lead-acid and then NiMH demonstrated, those chemistries lacked the energy density - and oftentimes the power density - to perform adequately. There wasn't much of a future in lead-acid or even NiMH-powered vehicles that struggled to hit daily commuting range plus normal contingencies with margin to spare for bad conditions or unusual contingencies. The more complete the discharge, the more of a
cycle you get against cell lifetime than shallower discharges.
Hybrids on the other hand offered better economy by sizing the engine closer to average demand, buffering output to meet the brief peak demands of normal driving, something that NiMH was quite sufficient for without steep discharges to the point that NiMH hybrid packs routinely outlasted their warranties without degradation - some by multiples.
It's no coincidence
overprovisioning Li-Ion battery packs in modern BEVs is likely why they're seeing far better lifespans with less degradation than lead-acid and NiMH packs ever did.
And I'm sorry, but yes; there is a difference with gasoline-powered vehicles. You park one of those in good running condition, leave it alone, it's not going to spontaneously combust.
Ah, but it happens. It is indeed rare. But unlike whenever a BEV does so it's
not news since ICE vehicles aren't particularly novel.
industrial buildings are necessary
So is individual transportation, and with it the externalities imposed on society whenever there's an incident such as a vehicular accident causing property damage, injury, death, and anything else that necessitates the activation of emergency services. Suspect that dealing with BEV fires - and particular costs - is a drop in the bucket relative to the costs of responding to vehicle fires in general. If you really want to go into the weeds, I imagine that the increasing use of carbon fiber and aluminum in cars has also presented challenges and hazards to fire-rescue that we're not clutching pearls over.
to put out death-traps driven by individuals
[yawn] Cite something to back that assertion. I'd suggest that rather than pointing out that people have - died in electric vehicles, they have crashed, they have caught fire - you find verifiable data pointing to a higher incident rate than ICE vehicles. However, I suspect you're not going to find this information since storing li-ion cells in a pack managed by far better charging systems than even a high-grade hobby charger is only similarly dangerous to storing volatile liquid fuel in a vehicle's fuel tank.
with a horribly desperate need to look cool
Image drives the automobile market in nearly all segments to the point of near
pathology - sports cars, trucks, crossovers, economy cars, even commercial vehicles. At some level behind a large percentage of automobile purchases is the thought
what does this say about me? Our stereotypical self-described eco-conscious Tesla buyer is as much the
poseur as someone weighing the purchase of a Camero, a Ram, a Flex, a base model Fit, or even a Metris.
