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As an electric vehicle owner, I read the Nov. 15 commentary by Charles Murray (“The middle class is not buying electric vehicles as hoped. What happened?”) with interest but was very much left with the question “So tell me again exactly what is your point?”

Murray builds a case that electric vehicles are only an impractical plaything of the wealthy and will potentially never be sought after by the middle and lower income earners.

He presents the view that electric vehicles are present in households as a second vehicle sitting next to the Porsche or other ridiculously expensive vehicles.

Certainly for me, that is not the case.

I have owned a Tesla for four years and find it to be immensely practical and extraordinarily comfortable to drive. It also has remarkably high performance acceleration which is useful when needed to move the vehicle out of the path of potential danger. As for cost, I purchased the vehicle when Tesla was making an effort to break into the middle-class market and introduced the Model 3.

I will agree with Murray on what I presume it is his central point, and that is that at current costs of manufacture, electric vehicles cannot yet effectively compete for a reasonable share of the general vehicle market. The central question is: will that happen in the near future?

The core issues as I see it, are first, innovation required to reduce the cost of manufacture, particularly of the batteries, and second, improvement of both range and long-term durability of the batteries with.

There is intensive research going on now to address both of these core issues and there have been impressive claims of potential solutions.

This same scenario has played itself out multiple times in the last hundred years. Before Henry Ford adopted the assembly line method for vehicles, cars were truly playthings of the rich. Manufacturing innovation changed all that.

With the introduction of mainframe computers, experts at the time stated that the United States would need no more than two or three giant mainframes to meet all its computing needs. Now your cell phone contains many more times the computing power of those machines all from multiple aspects of innovation.

Plate glass was impossible to manufacture until an insightful inventor created the system of floating glass on molten tin. A similar innovation occurred with the introduction of the bottle blowing machine.

And then there is the example of aluminum which was a precious metal due to manufacturing difficulties. Innovation solved that and now we drink beer and carbonated beverages out of aluminum cans.

Murray is correct that the United States is now faced with a competitive manufacturing problem.

As a country with the best engineering resources in the world, we will either choose to innovate and compete, or we will import the engineered solution from other countries at a price.

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