1) Battery technology needs a massive break-through
2) The environmental impact of making and disposing of batteries is likely enormous with the environmental impact costs not yet fully allocated into mass electric vehicles.
3) Outside of the handful of major cities in China, the country is predominantly rural and undeveloped (almost third-world). Construction standards are easy to implement.
4) The USA is has a highly developed infrastructure. Adding or retrofitting 220 volt charging stations for multiple cars in every home, condo, apartment, and commercial location will require 50 to 100 years.
5) The current electrical grid is already under strain on hot or extremely cold days. Adding hundreds of thousands of coal burners?
6) Did anyone think to survey what the consumer wanted or is this a case of being forced to eat creamed spinach because “it’s good for you/the planet”?
Tyrants hate the automobile.
How can you control a population that can just hop in their vehicles and travel hundreds of miles at a time, on road or off? How can you tolerate fuel that can be stockpiled by individuals easily and lasts indefinitely?
But tyrants love electric cars. If you want to prevent mobility, all you have to do is throw a switch at Central Command, and all of those electric vehicles stop moving within a week. You can add controls so that every time an electric car is connected to the grid, it communicates its location and charge state to a central database, and perhaps a log of everywhere it has been and when.
Tyrants just love that sort of thing.
Imagine 40 000 cars arriving at the Pentagon at 8 am and plugging in.
How much lithium does it take to make the batteries for a single Tesla? Lithium is not an infinite resource:
Who (or what nations) controls the materials now used, or likely to be used, in battery manufacturing?
The average lifespan of lithium ion batteries is now 2-3 years. What is the environmental impact of replacing all the batteries on an electric car that frequently?