> Why do you think then that EVs have a "profitability cliff" after which it will just magically work, bubble capital access or no bubble capital access?
When Tesla started out, there was no model for this. Nobody had ever made an electric car that was reasonably competitive with gasoline powered cars. Nothing before Tesla was that fast with that much range. They might have spent billions of dollars trying to develop it and failed. It's hard to raise that much money when there is that amount of risk. But once you're actually doing it, the risk is proved out and there is a known viable model for success and all that's left is to mass produce the design. So now they've essentially done that for sedans and we're waiting on trucks.
> To rephrase the question: what will change in the structure of reality that will make EVs a great business?
Have a look at oil prices right now. They're a lot lower than they were end of last year. That's what a reduction in demand does. The reduction in demand came from the coronavirus, but you get a similar effect from replacing a relatively small percentage of vehicles with electric ones, because they use 0% as much oil as ICE vehicles.
In theory low oil prices are bad for electric cars, but they're also bad for oil producers, who are then making dramatically less money. And the amount of money they're making is the primary lobbying force against having a carbon tax. The other impediment is the pinch the consumer would feel at the pump, which low oil prices also address, as does a larger number of consumers driving electric cars. Take all those things together and it becomes a lot easier to get a carbon tax.
So you build enough electric cars to make the oil industry bleed enough that they're no longer strong enough to resist the need of everyone else in the world to kill them, they are then killed, and ~100% of new cars become electric. Which makes electric cars a good business to be in.
But first you have to get over the hump.