I guess as a general phenomenon I'm just aggravated with press coverage of compliance cars that don't point out they aren't really available outside of a handful of CA-compliance states. Mitsubishi and Nissan are really selling cars nationwide, and I think Ford's headed in the same direction with their Focus Electric (though at the price they're charging to add an EV drive train to a barely modified economy car, it's not exactly what I would consider an exercise in EV boosterism). But the top management of companies like Toyota, Honda, and Fiat obviously couldn't care less about electrics. Being forced to deliver them, they're milking the PR benefits and "green cred" for all they're worth, but don't let their happy-talk web pages fool you - actions speak louder than words. I'm very annoyed when the automotive press treat these non-products more seriously than the car companies themselves do.
My problem with compliance cars like Fiat's 500e is twofold. First, of course, is that most Americans cannot buy them - because their only purpose is to allow their manufacturers access to the lucrative California market (and incidentally those states that clone CA standards), those manufacturers who don't believe in the EV market segment have no interest in making them more widely available. Second, cars built just to push their makers over CA's arbitrary "EV sales volume" goal line will be sold in such low numbers that the manufacturers hardly care about the unit manufacturing costs of those paltry few units. Since they only need to sell the mandated minimum, that's all they plan to do. Couple that with the high net worth EV enthusiast crowd in CA, and what we see are either high prices (like the somewhat ridiculous RAV4-EV) or hand-built cars sold or leased at a loss (like Honda's Fit EV). The upshot of this is that these companies aren't doing the hard work of figuring out how to get costs down by sharper engineering to appeal to the widest possible audience.
Nissan deserves huge credit for moving a lot of Leafs and making big bets (even with subsidies) on manufacturing facilities to build them in the U.S., and I really respect Mitsubishi's effort to deliver EVs to the U.S. at a price customers here would be willing to pay. I may prefer the tradeoffs Mitsubishi chose (I'd rather have a lower-priced car with better thermal and power management and spartan amenities than a more expensive one with a guess-o-meter, dicey thermal management, and more impressive accommodations), while most EV buyers apparently prefer Nissan's choices, but the fact is that both worked very hard to design a car they could afford to build and sell in relatively high volumes. Those efforts are worthy of respect, and automotive reviewers who fawn over cars less carefully engineered by indifferent makers with no ambitions beyond selling their "real" cars in California do a great disservice to Nissan, Mitsubishi, and the readers of those reviews.
