The Roadster (released 2008) sold less than 2,500 vehicles. It is a historical curiosity, like the EV1--the fact that a tiny handful of people bought the Roadster without tax incentives tells you little about how consumers would react to a mainstream vehicle. The story of mainstream EVs starts with the federal tax incentives in 2009, the GM Volt and Nissan Leaf in 2010, and the Tesla Model S in 2012.

Tesla has done a good job making popular, well-rated cars. But this idea that they were "first" while others were "sitting on their asses" is just completely factually incorrect. Competing car manufacturers dipped their toes into EVs years before Tesla even existed, and everyone rushed to build mainstream EVs in the same 2007-2012 time frame, with Nissan and GM releasing their products first.[1]

[1] Also, I don't see the relevance of the Ford loan? I'm not the one trying to add a moral dimension to the history of EVs. There is none. The relevance of the federal subsidies is not "oh, Tesla took subsidies." But rather that subsidies were necessary to make EVs attractive to consumers. The EV1 was canceled because consumer surveys in the late 1990s showed that you'd have to sell an EV for $28,000 less than a gas car to get consumers to buy it. Rising gas prices closed up a lot of that gap, along with advances in battery technology improving range. But the $10,000 or so in federal and state tax credits also played a huge role in making EVs palatable to consumers.