Governments’ favorite direction is backwards. From Eric Peters at ericpetersautos.com:
It gets tedious having to bat away the rationalizations for the EV’s numerous shortcomings. Has there ever been a case of an inferior product being defended to the extent EVs are defended?
Try to imagine people defending Betamax against the VCR – when it had become obvious that the VCR was the superior product.
For those not old enough to remember, there was a brief battle for market between the video cassette recorder (VCR) and a rival called Betamax. The VCR cost less and performed better, so Betamax lost market. The VCR, in its turn, gave way to the compact disc – which is still around but has to vie for market with streaming.
This is how it usually goes – which is to say, it goes from worse to better – when the market is (per The Chimp) the decider.
But government often decides differently – as in the old Soviet Union, where the government decided the only car the average Russian would be allowed to have – maybe, after many years of waiting – would be a Trabant, which was an awful little car barely worthy of being called such. It was inferior in every way to the cars that were available in the West, which at that time was still very different from the old Soviet Union. The people who were stuck living in the Soviet Union understood they’d gotten the short end of the stick and didn’t try to rationalize the “virtues” of living (of being forced to live) a meaner, harder life.
