I understand it was always an appealing choice to a small subset of customers (have charging stations at home / work, only travel relatively short distances, etc) but all the disadvantages of EV that people are pointing out now were even worse a few years ago – like high purchase prices, range concerns, batteries underperforming in cold weather, lack of infrastructure, repairability etc.
What was the actual driver behind the massive EV boom?
In: Engineering
Tesla Supercharger station and game industry practices.
EV vehicles are more expensive and people in upper economic strata are more likely to conduct interstate travel or, in case of Europe, to conduct intercountry travel. So if these people wanted to drive EV, they would also need to have a second gas or hybrid car.
Tesla solved this issue with Supercharger stations. If people know that they can conduct these sort of travels, they are willingly to buy EV.
However for building Supercharger to cover the most used interstate freeways, Tesla would need significant funding. And they got it basically the same way as game industry conducted. By pre-order. Literally. Everyone who bought a Tesla before production or in the first few months would get unlimited supercharging for the entirety of the vehicle life and possibly being transferable to future Tesla vehicles.
With so many people pre-ordering Tesla models, Tesla became the only player in this new EV market quickly. It would be foolish for any auto manufacturer to try to compete with Tesla when they were lagging in R&D by far and had no funding to build supercharger infrastructure.
Only after Tesla reached a critical point of sustainability and enough market value did Tesla announced its chargers would be compatible with other EV cars. Only at this point it made sense for traditional auto players to join the EV market.
And only at this last scenario did EV got a meteoric rise.
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