[old jupiter]

Agreed!!

A lot of people in cities, towns, and burbs would be very well served with small, simple, cheap pure-electric cars for 95% of their driving. But I think the electric car builders are way off-track with their insistance on range, high performance, and sleek styling. My elderly dad could have run any low-tech electric car for three weeks of normal use on one charge, and never gone over 45mph. And the requirements of old codgers are going to be ever more important as we Boomers get into our dotage. Elon Musk with his absurdly expensive hyper-car is answering a need no one has, while the cheap little electrics with lead-acid batteries from India and China won't meet the stupid regulations our government insists upon to keep us all very safe and unthreatened. There were cars a hundred years ago that would do the job for a lot of us, given some better brakes and tires. Seems to me that hybrids are best suited to people in cities who have only one parking spot and need a do-it-all car. The plug-in hybrids will be great for such folk. But, IMHO, for most of the rest of us, hybrids are an excessively complex, rather problematic compromise, and for that matter the manufactures don't like them a lot because they don't make money on them.

(EDIT--Why do I persist in abbreviating "In my humble opinion" as IMOH??!!)