It's real easy for a politician who will be out of office in 2-4yrs to buy votes today with a program that will be paid for 20yrs down the road.
What baffles me is this goal to produce a car that can compete with a gas powered car in terms of capability. It makes them expensive and complicated and ultimately has slowed down their acceptance.
Why would I pay $35k for an electric econobox when I can pay $16k for a gas econobox that gets 40mpg.
Instead limit the range to 50-60miles and drive the price below $20k and market them as 2nd family cars. The vast majority of commuters go less than 50 miles in a day and would have access to a gas powered car for those rare longer trips, so your market is probably 25-40% of all cars sold. An $18k car where you never have to pay for gasoline vs a $16k car where you have to constantly buy gasoline is a lot easier sale. Add in the $7500 tax credit and it's drastically cheaper.
Of course in terms of trucks and RV's its a different ballgame. The typical cargo load in a passenger car is under 300lbs. Maximum capacity is maybe 1000lbs. More importantly, it's relatively easy to make a passenger car extremely aerodynamic.
With trucks and RV's (ignoring people using pickups as grocery getters), trucks are on average taking along several times as much cargo and the aerodynamics are horrible by comparison. This creates a compounding problem, you can add more batteries but that means you need more batteries to drag around the extra batteries. In commercial trucks you start eating up the weight limits which means you may need a 2nd truck because rather than a semi carrying 25tons of cargo, they can only carry 15 tons of cargo before they hit the weight limit.
