When a major change is made to how something is done, there really needs to be a very significant improvement that makes the cost of changing worthwhile. I thi

When a major change is made to how something is done, there really needs to be a very significant improvement that makes the cost of changing worthwhile. I think eventually this will happen with electric vehicles, but no one knows for sure. Which is probably why we shouldn't subsidize solutions that are not compelling enough. The current electric vehicles aren't even as good as what they are attempting to replace and wouldn't be available at all without the massive subsidies. If we do subsidize things in an effort to "jumpstart" the change, we might actually switch to a system that is not compelling enough and might get persuaded to jumpstart the next generation, which might have been compelling enough on its own. And be stuck with the cost of the subsidies or paying the higher cost directly. Of course, such changes become so monolithic to begin with when government picks a standard and encourages everyone to adopt it. It may drive down costs in the short run, but it reduces progress in the long run. For example, the adoption of the NTSC tv format and enforcing it using the FCC. We got color. Then we got closed captioning. And that was probably all the innovation we got over 50 years. But look at how quickly video has evolved on personal computers by comparison.