My personal opinion on this differs from most. Looks up pictures of battery mines. They look like a nuke went off. I'm not against battery but I am against a mandate. It will cripple this country. The poor will get poorer as they can't afford to buy a bev. So how do they get to work? Our electrical grid cannot handle all this added strain. There's rolling blackouts in alot of the more "green" places as it is. These mandates cripple our economy and drive up prices for all. I think the corre t solution is to continue to develop more clean ways. Maybe event to reward company's that look into this. But never to mandate it. We need a plethora of energy options to keep our country strong. They come for your ICE now. How long before they come for your woodstove? The amount of control we have let our government have saddens me and makes me feel sick.
I will echo
@Ashful here and ask, where are these mandates for BEVs? I haven't seen any. A few cities and a couple states have said they will ban NEW ICE vehicle sales in 2035 or something. Even those won't keep you from buying them out of state and moving them in. Even the most rosy predictions of EV adoption have BEVs reaching 50% of new car sales in the US in 2028... and that curve implies that BEVs will make up only 20-25% of cars on the road by 2032 at most.
The transition will be SLOW. People will be driving ICE cars well in the 2040s, a generation from now.
As for cost? Every engineering analysis I have seen suggests that long-range, fast charging BEVs will be CHEAPER to buy AND to operate than ICE vehicles. They contain a lot fewer moving parts, and are faster to assemble and are much cheaper to maintain.
Those batteries? Their cost is falling exponentially, and is expected (based upon analyses with many other technologies) to fall to a small multiple (1.x) of the cost of the raw materials in them. The cost of those raw materials? Those are available in natural deposits all around the world in sufficient amounts, and so will (once they are developed) have prices comparable to historical levels... which were cheap. The projected price of batteries in a decade... cheap enough to make a long range BEV cheaper than a comparable ICE vehicle to buy. Many of them are already cheaper on a total cost of ownership, TCO, basis.
The car makers are starting the transition with their luxury models that are the highest profit, to customers that want higher performance and the latest tech. That does not mean that EVs are inherently expensive. The 2022 Chevy Bolt I drive cost me the equivalent of $24k MSRP, and I did not get a fed rebate... it will be eligible for one next year, bringing its purchase price down to closer to $20k. This is already holding down the price of used Bolts, which will also get a rebate in 2023, further reducing their price.
The grid? All those EVs will increase electrical demand by maybe 20% in 2050. Like increasing it by less that 1% a year, no problemo. And ofc most of that charging is done at low demand periods (like overnight) bc the utility offers a lower rate then, so it doesn't increase peak demand even that much. One can cherry pick examples of badly managed or corrupt grids, like in California and Mass, and say 'see green power is bad', but then there was the Texas fiasco that actually killed people (and sadly will be likely to do so again, as the problems were not addressed).
There is a lot of misinformation out there these days from a variety of sources...