Maybe relax on the 300mi range and get a Nissan Leaf.

These luxury features aren't why these products are so expensive. They are thrown in to segment the market and make people feel better about spending this huge amount of money. There is no incentive for the people producing these products to remove these luxuries.

Soon the only option for people who can't afford or simply don't want to buy the new luxury product is to buy an old and rundown version of what was once a luxury product. New affordable alternatives just aren't as profitable so they aren't produced anymore in the quantities that we actually need.

Living in the sticks?

ICEs enabled housing sparsity, reversing that is part of the solution.

I’d like to know what percentage of GDP is done “in the sticks”. It’s one of the more viable ways to address NIMBYISM and locality problems.

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/redefining-rural-am...

That census definition of urban/rural is different from the colloquial definition. The census link allows an "urban" classification as low as 2,500 people.

Colloquially-defined rural areas have been decimated by globalization in the last 40 years. The "rural" area I grew up in had thousands of manufacturing jobs; now it may have 200. The drop in GDP goes far beyond urban sprawl enabled by ICE vehicles.

Also critical infrastructure is out “in the sticks” like dams, power infrastructure (lines/plants/storage), and the support of the container trucks. Then there’s agriculture. It all needs to be electrified and reachable by electrics.

https://www.jdpower.com/cars/shopping-guides/how-often-do-te...

The battery still drives costs to some extent, but the bigger issue is manufacturing capacity; you can only make so many EVs on the existing production lines (including battery factory capacity), and there's plenty of high-end demand to consume the supply, so you're not going to leave money on the table selling a cheap car.

People who want a cheap EV just have to do what every cost-conscious consumer does when a new technology comes along: wait. At some point there will be plenty of EVs for the PMC and it will make sense to build one for the rest of us.

While I think plenty of buyers yearn for a "traditional" car, it's hard to justify one with the added base cost of electric. The Nissan Leaf got pretty close to this (albeit with less range) and while it sold OK, it was far from a barn-busting success.

The marginal cost of adding gizmos and gadgets to an electric car is not very high due to the large base cost sunk into the platform, so we get gizmos and gadgets.

This may be plausible, but is there data to support it? Because, anecdotally, all the add-ons of "gizmos and gadgets" options can blow up the price. For example, a base F-150 is $43,325. The Platinum options package adds over $23k in just options.

I suspect the more likely culprit is manufacturing cost and efficiency. It just makes more sense to make electric windows the default when the majority of people are going to pay for them anyways.

We have villages in Eastern Europe that don't have plumbing or gas, yet they have fiber optic cable and free and fast public Wi-Fi, so you see horse-pulled carts carrying villagers with laptops.

That's what I'd feel like in 2023 rolling my own window in an EV.

For the car you're describing, check out the Chevy Bolt EV/EUV. It's the closest car to what you're asking for, although it doesn't have a 300 mile range. It may be hard though, Chevy is moving all they can make.

But there are stories of people driving them in below 0 F where if you don't warm it up in the morning (via setting the leave time when charging) they have real loss. This is another area tesla is way ahead, with the battery mgmt system working better in the cold, plus the heat pump. People in cold Quebec also suffer this cold weather.

AUD$35,000 for small subcompact is not cheap.

I'd pay extra for that

The Oli is especially impressive in that they've learned that you can sacrifice battery capacity, and if you just keep the car lightweight and aerodynamic enough, you can still get decent range. They're claiming a (pretty phenomenal) 6.2 miles per kWh, and for a car targeting a price point starting at $20k that offers the utility of a small city car, SUV, and pickup truck in a single vehicle, I find it compelling, even as the sort of person for whom this is the least viable car.

And if $20k sounds like too much, the Ami is less impressive, but I think starts at closer to $10k.