No company in the USA has bothered to roll out some value menu options for these times. Remember when the objective was to make the EV cost as much as a gas car? not so much lately..
Manufacturers today make more money off of financing their cars than selling their cars. Consider GMAC as an example. In order to help people "afford" their products, in the present day it's not unusual for a dealership to offer a 96 month payment plan at 11% APR. The vehicles are then deliberately made unrepairable by a local mechanic outside of a dealership, and said vehicles aren't made to last longer than the warrantee, forcing the buyer back into their "ecosystem" when the vehicle is finally paid off and something on the vehicle fails that is more expensive to repair than the vehicle is worth.
The automakers have a nice little grift going, and they are doing everything they can to close off alternative transportation methods that will allow people to avoid buying into it, including trying to use emissions laws in places to take older vehicles off the road, lobbying for the adding of ethanol to fuel that damages older engines, using legislation to keep affordable Chinese EV competitors out of the USA market, lobbying for anti e-bike legislation, opposing legislation that expands bicycling infrastructure, lobbying against mass transit and high speed rail systems, and writing "safety" rules so burdensome that no one else can get into the auto industry to compete. The people running these corporations don't believe that the poor who can't afford to buy into this scheme should have any mobility at all, because they aren't paying them. It's already so onerous to the average American that the average American spends about $14,000/year to keep their 13-year-old clunker car on the road, when the average annual wage for a full-time worker before taxes/deductions are taken out is only about $40,000. Pile on $2,000/mo rent and $1,000+/mo health insurance costs and you can quickly see the problem for the average person: debt. It's very difficult to avoid and basically mandatory. Homelessness has also been criminalized, in order to keep people grinding on the hamster wheel, while continuous money printing constantly devalues their savings.
All of this is in effort to maintain continuous economic growth, when we live on a planet of finite natural resources. It will eventually blow up in everyone's' collective faces, except for the ones who created the grift and are profiting from it. The ones who created the grift don't care about the consequences, because they're dumping them onto the rest of the population. Socialize the losses, privatize the gains, and they're using the threat and force of government to do it. It's not by accident that lots of prisons keep being built. They're there for the people who wish to drop out of the ponzi scheme by no longer caring to follow the laws that exist to force them to buy into it, where they can then be used as slave labor.
Sad state of affairs compared to the EV optimism of the late 2000's to late 2010's
It's especially sad because EVs are simple things with fewer failure points than ICE cars. Building an EV that can last a human lifetime, where the operator can buy a cheap car in college, rack up 1 million miles with 1-2 battery changes along the way and pass it onto their grandkids as a reliable daily driver in their old age, is not rocket science. The problem is that the industry doesn't get to milk the operator for every last cent and force product turnover. We could have had affordable, reliable, practical, long-ranged EVs on the roads in the 1990s once AC drives systems and NiMH batteries became possible to mass produce, but the industry fought them tooth and nail, and it wasn't until they figured out how to over-complicate them with unnecessary failure points and lock mechanics out of doing repairs that EVs were finally allowed to enter the automobile market.
The same can be said about platform efficiency. An ultra-aerodynamic platform is bad at extracting money from consumers in the form of fuel/energy usage and added wear and tear. The industry has just now caught up with the 1921 Rumpler Tropfenwagen on average car drag coefficient, more than a century after the Tropfenwagen was made. It has yet to catch up to that of the 1935 Tatra T77A, even if certain offerings from Lucid, Tesla, and Mercedes Benz have gotten there in recent years.
At the same time, the consumer is the one getting the blame for the environmental degradation of car usage, when it is the industry that is deliberately building the cars to be environmentally destructive in the name of profit, while the industry pays government to step in and over-complicate the cars and adds failure points in the name of the environment as well as "safety" which has the effect of making entry into the auto industry with an affordable mass-produced product prohibitively expensive for anyone who isn't a billionaire.
The real reason for all of this is that the ponzi scheme called our economic system requires infinite growth in order to continue existing, but it has started to brush up against the planet's finite resource base. So the extraction scheme is becoming more direct and individually targeted via subscription models, longer payment plans, product enshittification, increasing debt burdens, quantitative easing of the money supply while wages don't keep up, manipulation of official statistics(CPI, unemployment rate, ect.) to paint a rosier picture than the on-the-ground reality actually is, ect. And it's currently collapsing all around us. This collapse is leading to increased wars as the USA scrambles to secure access to resources that it's just going to keep wasting in futile effort to perpetuate the endless growth paradigm.
