Maybe it’s a “but when it happens you’re screwed” situation. I’m thinking of the story of BMW’s battery safety fuse (the one that trips in an accident to protect first responders and the people in the car) actually tripping when you hot the curb or a pothole harder. It requires a very expensive trip to the dealer. Some of my Tesla owning friends keep spending time in the shop getting something about the suspension fixed 2-3 times already.

I have no idea if Chinese EVs are consistently better, Volvo can be seen as one and I don’t think they excel at reliability lately.

P.S. Software issues are reliability issues. The software is a core part of the car and its value proposition, you can’t discount them as “just software issues, not reliability”.

I really wanted to like the iD4.

iD4 feels like they took every lesson of predictable UX design and then intentionally reversed it to make the most frustrating UI possible.

The window controls, touch buttons, screen, steering wheel controls, etc. They all seem designed to answer the question, "how could we make this unnecessarily difficult and distracting to use? How could we possibly cram in yet another State Machine for the user to keep (lose) track of?"

It also has the "try to kill the asthmatic by randomly switching off recirculate while driving through dense wood smoke" feature, naturally.

Considering how much money VW makes on EVs[0], I suppose I'm not surprised by this 'nudge' toward gas cars.

[0] https://www.motor1.com/news/758377/vw-making-less-money-sell...

The UK has a lot of "garage" brands too (the Morgans, Caterhams, BAC, etc.), but as you said they don't have a lot of lobbying power, and the lobbying they do is on behalf of lengthening THEIR transition to new EV requirements.

That said, the UK's history of small auto manufacturers would make it potentially ideal for a few domestic producers to make little EVs, similar to the Caterham 7, or the Ariel Atom for the domestic market, but they will never be the mass produced Tesla or BYD competitor.

I would have thought that to be the case too ... I know all about the exciting Xiaomi cars (e.g.) but I grew up in the era of the Chinese brand being "low quality". We're well beyond that now and have been for probably a decade. And don't get me wrong, I'm not a China cheerleader.

I give the example I mentioned. People local to me swapping out their model 3's for BYD. Maybe they just got to their end of their lease cycle and wanted to try something different, but I cannot believe they would have willingly chosen a significantly lower quality car (knowing some of them). And I believe the cost difference is marginal but the overall package just a bit better.

And you know people, they'll swap out anything for just a marginal saving. Doesn't have to be significant unless there's some network effects. And there really isn't with cars.

Anyway, I'm just yapping, but think the used Tesla market is going to get even more swamped than it already is. Not a bad thing because previously people looking for low cost cars were buying diesels - so I'm hopeful that'll transition to low cost EV's now ... but the game is up for Tesla automotive, but we've known that for some time.