Many asked. Only few were given those loans. Why not give the money to research universities instead? Wouldn't that be a lot more fair? We could all exploit the research, instead of just a few well-connected billionaires and corporations with lots of resources.
The critical component, by far, is the battery. If you find ways to build a better battery, electric cars are a practical reality. Academia is perfect for battery research.
Building a car is an engineering project. Building a new kind of car will be a science intensive engineering project, but an engineering project nevertheless. Designing a new car is an attempt at optimizing a high dimensional design space that spans many disciplines that are interdependent. This requires fundamentally different methods and organization than those used conventional research.