Something no one really talks about is the difficulty of just charging an electric car for anyone who isn't a homeowner. That's a nontrivial question -- and possibly a dealbreaker -- for millions of apartment dwellers.

Or homeowners without garages. I live in a house but park in the street in front of it. I can't practically string an extension cord to my car to charge it every night.

Nevermind what a bunch of drunk teenagers would do upon seeing that setup.

I'm in the same situation, there's the option of renting a nearby garage but when I factor that into the cost of an already expensive vehicle, the economics just aren't interesting at all.

Tesla's network of superchargers aim to solve this. They stopped giving out free supercharging IIRC, but it's still a great way to keep the battery close to topped off - you can do it as a short pitstop after driving to work, and the same after your drive home assuming you have a supercharger closeby

They're slowly making appearances in public parking lots, train stations, etc, even curbside spots in some cities.

But yeah, nowhere near the number needed for the electric car revolution (tm).

Although I've noticed most of said chargers are usually empty, so I suppose it's a chicken and egg problem.

Making an electric car is trivial. The big problem is that battery costs still cause the majority of the total vehicle cost. The e-golf is a perfect example of that. It's identical to the ICE version except it costs twice as much at the cost of significantly lower range. The 2017 version is still at the 30k price point but the range was upgraded to 185 miles. It will probably take another 3 years until we see a 300 mile version to eliminate range anxiety for the majority of the population and then it will take another 3-6 years for prices to go down.

The ICE vehicle manufacturers are waiting for battery costs to come down. They aren't short sighted. It's simple economics.