The alternative would be making petrol-car drivers paying for the actual costs of cars including healthcare for diseases related with pollution, possibly at any level of the production chain and so on.
Hidden costs are often cut away and offloaded on community (I couldn't find anything specifically related with cars (didn't have time to look for), but for comparison here's a short video that shows the real costs of meat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZDsSnpYZrw). Incentives make it a little bit more explicit. While it may be true claiming that Teslas cost would be higher without incentives, for sure Ford's car would be way more expensive if everything had been taken into account.
What's sad is that so many people seem to take an all-or-nothing stance on this politically. Either laissez faire or nanny state. Moderation is a dying art.
And if we don't invade country X, it may come back to bite us some day, right? And if we don't prop up the auto industry buying clunkers and robbing shareholders to pay union reps top dollar, people will have to start riding bikes and millions will be out of work, right?
If you're hoping for miracles, the government would be the last place to go looking for them. Necessity is the mother of invention, and while one could argue that our society "needs" this technology just like it "needs" to invade other countries, centralized decision making never leads to optimal outcomes, let alone "miracles".
