adiggs makes some good points.
Adding a few bits, car dealers make their biggest profits from their service centers. They make a little selling cars, but they make a lot more on service items. ICE cars need oil changes, belts, hoses, and a bunch of other things a pure EV doesn't. Hybrids make a lot of sense from a service point of view, they are more complex than pure EVs and require just as much maintenance as an ICE. Dealers don't lose money with hybrds.
I've been car shopping for about 6 months and started in the ICE world. My criteria was:
1) I have very long legs, so I needed to be able to get the driver's seat back far enough, that scratches most smaller cars.
2) I'm not a fan of SUVs, high drag, high center of gravity, usually poor mileage.
3) I need to take road trips to California (I live outside of Portland, OR) for both business and family (my father is 95). I need a car with enough room I'm not stove up after the trip.
4) I work from home so I've been able to get away with driving my 23 year old Buick, but I want something that gets better gas mileage than the Buick. At least 30% would be preferable.
5) I would like at least the same level of storage space as my current Buick.
6) I want something that can accelerate at least as well as the Buick, which has a 5.7L V-8. It's not a sports car, but it isn't bad either.
My price target was somewhere $30K - $40K, but I could stretch it to $50K without really hurting if I had to.
I didn't think it would be that tough to find something that fit all this criteria, but it was very tough. Most cars with enough leg room and even 70% the storage space of my Buick have horrible gas mileage. Some had gas mileage numbers pretty much the same as the Buick! I also found that engine design has come a long ways which means cars can produce a lot more horsepower out of much smaller engines now, however the trade off is a much narrower range where you get that horsepower. My Buick has good acceleration across the speed range (for an ICE), but newer cars with reasonable gas mileage that do have decent acceleration only have it in a very narrow band and are gutless under other conditions.
And this come back around to the point, one thing I found was the ICE makers make you suffer some kind of trade off if you want something like a hybrid. Usually the trunk space was reduced for batteries, and most hybrids have pretty bad acceleration. The Prius is the best selling hybrid, but I think that's because it's one of the few that doesn't make the buyer feel like they are giving up something to get the hybrid features. However, even the Prius is a bit sluggish on acceleration.
Ford was my first choice because the only car dealership close by is a Ford dealer. The Fusion was too small for me, but I test drove one because I did like the hybrid option. But even then I was wondering why they don't put the batteries under the floor instead of in the trunk.
Then on a lark I looked at the Model S. It met or exceeded every criteria, except the price. I need to be frugal for a while longer to afford one.
Tesla doesn't need to please their dealer network, nor any of the other suppliers that would be put out of business by a switch to pure electrics which freed them up to design the world's best electric car from the ground up.
Bangor Bob mentioned the various transportation revolutions. The switch from wood frames to steel was quicker because there was no incentive to stay with the old method. Wood frames were weaker and limited how big the car could get. The only people who might oppose the change were some woodworking shops. Other changes took longer because there was more resistance. When unibodies came along, there was still a well entrenched group of gear heads who loved body on frame. For one thing it's easier to do custom cars with body on frame, you can replace the entire body if you want. A lot of the execs at car companies were these gear heads who liked the "old way" and resisted the new. Some of the last cars to get unibodies were the top of the line models.
Changing from carriages with motors to what we think of as cars took some time because it was a major change to the look that the public was going to notice. They needed to get used to the idea of motorized transport first, then change the designs to better fit the new power source.
At this point I think it's a fairly good bet Tesla has started a revolution in the car industry, but there is still a chance (getting smaller every day) that Tesla could lose this battle. At minimum Tesla has shown what is possible with a complete redesign and people aren't going to forget that, even if the powers that be would prefer we did.
I watched "Who Killed the Electric Car" the other day. I hadn't seen it before and it is dated with what happened since. I also watched the sequel which follows the first days of Tesla among other things. In the first movie, they explored the possible players who could have killed the EV1 in California. It basically boiled down to: the car dealers hated it because they lost money on regular service, the car company execs hated it because it was too different, the oil companies hated it because it threatened their entire business model, and various government agencies resisted it, largely due to pressure from all of the above.
Tesla is still bucking all these forces. Their ace card is they have a fantastic product far superior to ICE cars in almost every way. There was a thread on the forum a couple of weeks ago about an article that asked why people aren't buying Teslas. At a get together we had a few weeks ago, the subject of Tesla came up (I didn't start it). Everyone knew a fair bit about Tesla and everyone wanted one (even the people who weren't into cars at all), but the only thing holding them back was the price. For that reason, I think the Model 3 will be a huge hit that will start sending true panic waves through the industry.