Volvo Proposes 100-Mile Plug-In Hybrids for Drivers with Range Anxiety

What do you mean? America has 2 offerings from Chevy, and now the Slate truck as well. Japan has the Nissan Leaf. Korea and Germany produce a few cheap EVs too. None of these vehicles are large and all of them are focused on being cheap for the mass market. The PRC's offerings rely on favorable currency positioning and extremely apathetic labor conditions (leading to better cost-efficiency). It's not an industrialist's miracle.

It's not the size of the car per se, but the vast amount of technology and features crammed into the car that drives up the cost. An old VW bus could fit a lot of people, but was still produced cheaply compared to production costs today. That old bus had no self-driving, no power windows, no lane assist, no anti-lock brakes, no automatic transmission, no infotainement center, no air suspension, no automatic seat adjustments or backup camera, no soundproofing, no heads up display, no A/C, it didn't beep when something was in your blind spots, it had no crumple zones or other safety features. I'm not even sure if it had a catalytic converter. Just think of the huge number of electrical computer modules and the hundreds of miles of wiring, the millions of lines of software code. And those computers need to work in the Arizona heat when you park your car in the sun, even though you might fry a consumer grade laptop if you left it in the same car.

That's why smaller cars aren't that much cheaper. They are still crammed with all these features.

The BLS measures inflation which requires making the much maligned hedonic adjustments, which is basically saying things like "the new widget holds twice as much memory" or "this car also has an airbag". For automobiles, they look at production costs, and when you take production costs into account, cars aren't that much more expensive in real terms today. We just cram so many features into them now.

Not all the advantages though, hybrids need oil changes, transmission fluid changes, water pump, spark plugs, timing belts, etc. all the maintenance burden of an ICE that EVs do not carry.

I’d rather have an ev with a diesel generator in the pickup bed as my “range extender” than a vehicle with constant maintenance needs.