[...] I think that currently EV purchasers probably are early adopters who have a propensity to want to stand out to some degree.
That explanation has been spread through the press for years, and I think it has legs because it "makes sense".
AFAICT it started when the 2nd-gen Prius sold far better than the Civic Hybrid. The prices were about the same, and the Prius looked stranger, so people must prefer the odd look, no? Many people disdainful of hybrids seemed especially happy to latch on to this explanation. "Prius buyers just want attention." It helped them dismiss people that bought a car they didn't want. (Prius buyers themselves were more likely to latch on to "it has to be ugly for good aerodynamics").
However, I have never seen any surveys or data to back up this position, though I have seen a couple that oppose it. As a Prius buyer myself 11 years ago, I can attest that I bought the Prius
despite rather than
because of the looks - I really would have preferred the Civic. But the Prius had more room in the rear seats and cargo area, and it had notably better mpg - which was the main reason that we buyers were in the market in the first place.
Toyota hadn't figured out that people wanted odd-looking cars. Toyota had figured out that people shopping primarily for mpg would
put up with odd-looking cars. Keeping the low-margin Prius odd-looking kept people that didn't care that much about mpg buying better-looking, higher-margin vehicles.
Of course this explanation is not one that any automaker would ever offer in public, so you don't see it often in the press. But this is a typical "versioning" marketing scheme that is common in many industries to increase overall profits.
There is more on this in the other thread linked in my signature below. The relation to the current thread topic is that the other manufacturers absolutely CAN produce cars like Tesla. They just don't want to yet because they can more easily make higher margins on other types of cars. This won't be true forever, and in fact some like Nissan have already acknowledged that they will change their approach with more "mainstream" cars.