[gamblor956]

Car companies started going electric because California and Federal fuel standards require increasing fuel efficiency on a fleet basis, and the only way to achieve those goals is now through zero-emissions vehicles like hydrogen, fuel cell, or EV. Hydrogen tech and fuel cells are still too inefficient and expensive for consumer vehicles (especially given the rare-earth materials required for high-efficiency fuel cells). Batteries happened to get much cheaper due to their increasing use in non-vehicle electronics like cell phones, which made EVs the best choice from a tech and cost perspective.

In other words, Tesla didn't actually make car manufacturers "wake up and go electric." They were going to go electric anyway because it was the obvious tech choice.

Tesla's accomplishment was to show that people were finally ready to buy green cars that looked like normal cars. (The first hybrids and EVs from Toyota and Nissan looked like normal cars, and sold horribly. Toyota and Nissan introduced the butt-ugly designs because green car buyers back in the day wanted distinctive cars to show off their greenliness.)

t neither of those 2 things (Toyota's Prius 2, and California's green car incentives) were successful in making car manufacturers wake up and go electric.

California's green car incentives and fuel efficiency requirements are what drove most car companies to invest in green car tech in the first place.

[m463]

I suspect some "compliance cars" are ugly so they don't sell too many of them (since they lose money on each one).

And as to the leaf, I think it was actually modeled after the Prius, and it sold well since there are 400,000 of them out there.

[confiscate]

I disagree. California's green car incentive drove most companies to invest in green car tech as a toy, but it was always a hobby. A side project for R&D.

Car manufacturers never took green cars seriously and never felt the need to transition large amounts of their cars from gas to green. It was only when Tesla started making a splash that car companies took electric cars seriously.