I strongly disagree that skipping hybrids was a great idea.

IMO a 40-50 mile PHEV would have effectively electrified 60-80% of car trips by 2020 if the US had mandated their use in all cars back in 2002 (about 5 years after the Prius and Insight were introduced).

I think carbon emissions could have been greatly reduced by 2015 with good foresight. Of course we're talking the Bush Administration in 2005, so that wasn't happening, and Obama didn't have the political firepower either.

Really within a year of the viability of the Prius Congress should have passed CAFE laws that basically forced hybrids in every consumer car segment as soon as possible, and then followed up 5 years later with a PHEV requirement, and then 5 years later with a 40 mile all electric requirement.

Why is that such an amazing idea? Simple, it maximizes the impact of the battery manufacturing supply. Instead of a Tesla Model S with a 350 mile range toting around 85% of its batteries daily for no reason, all of those batteries would have gone to actual daily use.

But now the industry is not going to do that, everyone is replatforming or replatformed for pure EVs.

Sure, the government should have done a lot of things.

But we weren't talking about government, we were talking about Tesla. I don't think Tesla releasing a plugin hybrid instead of the Model S would have led to everyone having a hybrid today, much in the same way everyone doesn't have a BEV today.

I think ironically PHEVs (or more realistically, range extended BEVs) will actually gain popularity as the proportion of people with BEVs begins to cross the 50% threshold. For them to really make sense to sell there needs to be a big enough market that making the low power engines required becomes dirt cheap per unit. As it stands the difference in cost between a pure BEV and a PHEV is so low that paying that little bit more for the BEV makes sense basically every time.

The problem for PHEVs is that as BEVs cross 50%, there will be more electric vehicle infrastructure, and the hybrid becomes moot. Either you have access to cheap (overnight, at-home) charging, or you don't.

The hybrid extends the range of batteries, but the use case is small and becomes smaller. The vast majority of people will plug in overnight. Very long trips use quick chargers. The hybrid case is reduced to places where you don't think you can plug in (which will be few when BEVs become the majority).

There are corner cases: "Yes, I like to haul my enormous boat to the lake hundreds of miles every single week and so the quick chargers still require hours". But in the end I think that such corner cases will be reduced to "Fine, go buy an old ICE car, and plan your trip around the diminishing number of gas stations".

Yeah, which is why now the play is full EV.

But 10-15 years ago there is a generation or two of ICE still to go. Making all those PHEVs would have been a massive improvement to emissions.