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Earlier this week, we learned of an effort by some auto dealers to pump the brakes on the US government's electric vehicle adoption goals . EVs are sitting too long on dealership lots, they say, and the public just isn't ready to switch. Those fears are overblown says JD Power; it says that 29.2 percent of consumers say they're very likely to buy an EV as their next car, a percentage that grew 3 percent last month alone.

That means EV marketshare should grow to 13 percent by the end of 2024, and to 24 percent in 2026, according to JD Power, which it says places the EV market still in the "early adopter" phase. (Current EV market share is about 8 percent.)

But the industry has some work to do if it wants to smoothly transition from those early adopters to the "early majority" phase , and JD Power's advice sounds a lot like what we constantly hear in the comments: build smaller, cheaper EVs.

Enlarge / This image shows the Uni Wheel concept in three different stages of articulation. (credit: Hyundai)

We like weird new engineering ideas here at Ars, and today we have a particularly interesting one in the realm of electric cars. It's called the Uni Wheel, and it has been designed by Hyundai and Kia as a way to revolutionize the layout of an EV powertrain to more efficiently use space. In fact, the automakers say it's not just for cars—the new drive system works with wheel sizes as small as four inches to as large as 25 inches.

For EV enthusiasts of a certain bent, there's something a little inefficient about the way virtually every EV powertrain is laid out.

Not the battery in the middle, though—while it's bulky and raises the overall height of EVs, it makes sense for weight distribution, although people working on structural carbon-fiber batteries have some different ideas about that. The problem is the EV drive unit, a bulky thing that contains the electric motor, some gearing, and usually some power electronics. These take up room between the axles and have to be packaged around.

Enlarge / Haven Mercer's prototype front assembly for an automatic bike transmission. (credit: Haven Mercer)

Depending on how you look at it, either a lot or not very much has changed about the way bikes shift gears since the mid-19th century .

A lot has been refined along the transmission path, in which your feet push cranks, those cranks turn a big gear, and a chain connects that big gear to a smaller gear on the rear wheel. Shifting has picked up lots of improvements, be they electronic or wireless, as have derailleurs and internal gearboxes. Materials and tolerances have only improved over the decades.

But in almost all cases, you're still manually adjusting something to move the chain and change gears, depending on the resistance you're feeling on the bike. Even the most outlandish recent ideas still involve indexed movement between different-sized gears.

Enlarge / It will probably be a while before you see these on the road, but some Tesla stores now have display Cybertrucks. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

On Thursday afternoon, Tesla delivered the first 10 production Cybertrucks to customers at an event livestreamed on X, Tesla CEO Elon Musk's social media network. A demo video featured shots of the Cybertruck negotiating barren wildernesses, including one that was meant to look like Mars. Musk, who has mostly made headlines in recent weeks for endorsing virulent antisemtitic theories on his social media platform , took to the stage almost half an hour late, initially delivering his presentation from the back of a truck with his face hidden in shadow.

Musk claimed the Cybertruck is better than any other truck but also more of a sports car than any other sports car, made of a "special Tesla designed steel alloy" that he claimed will never rust and which cannot be stamped but which can also be produced in volume.

Mindful of the window-breaking debacle during the truck's debut in 2019 , Tesla designer Franz von Holzhausen came on stage to throw baseballs at its windows. Unlike last time (when presenters used metal balls), the allegedly bulletproof glass did not shatter. Musk made a point of the fact that in a crash with another vehicle, the Cybertruck—which weighs 6,603–6,843 lbs (2,995–3,104 kg)—will destroy the other vehicle.

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Despite the fact that most of us generally drive short distances when we get in our cars, the time it takes to fast-charge an electric vehicle remains of paramount importance to potential EV buyers. It's hard to blame them—for more than a century, motorists have come to expect short refueling stops, and until someone actually lives with an EV for a while, it can be hard to make that paradigm shift. And of course, not everyone has the ability to slow-charge an EV at home or at work, your author included.

So with that in mind, the consumer advice publication Edmunds decided to test a whole bunch of EVs to find out which one adds the most miles of range in the fewest minutes possible.

Working with the automotive consultancy P3, Edmunds tested 43 different EVs, running down their batteries on its EV range-testing route to calculate the car's efficiency, then fast-charged them from 10 to 80 percent, measuring peak and average charging power and calculating charging losses in the process. Edmunds says it did this because automakers are inconsistent in advertising fast-charging times—some list charge times from 10 to 80 percent, while others simply say their cars can add 100 miles (160 km) of range in a given time.

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Widely accepted wisdom has it that electric vehicles are easier to maintain than those with internal combustion powertrains. It seems intuitive—EVs have many fewer moving parts than cars that have to detonate small quantities of hydrocarbon fuel thousands of times a minute. But the data don't really bear out the idea. In fact, according to data collected by Consumer Reports, EVs are significantly less reliable than conventionally powered cars.

CR is known for buying cars for its own test fleet, but for its annual auto reliability survey, the organization cast a wider net. Specifically, it gathered data from 330,000 owners of vehicles from model year 2000 onwards, and it uses that survey data to generate reliability scores for each vehicle and model year .

The results are a little inconvenient for the EV evangelist. EVs had 79 percent more reliability problems than a gasoline- or diesel-powered vehicle, on average. Plug-in hybrids fared even worse; these had 146 percent more issues on average than the conventional alternative. But simpler not-plug-in hybrids bucked this trend, with 26 percent fewer reliability problems than conventionally powered vehicles.

Enlarge / Democratic Senators Joe Manchin (L) and Debbie Stabenow (R) don't exactly see eye to eye on the auto industry's transition to electric vehicles. (credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

The new and somewhat-complicated rules governing which cars do or don't qualify for the new clean vehicle tax credit look like they might get tweaked a little in the near future.

Before, the tax credit was linked to the battery-storage capacity of a plug-in hybrid or battery-electric vehicle. But the Inflation Reduction Act changed that— now a range of conditions must be met , including final assembly in North America and an annually increasing percentage of locally sourced minerals and components within that battery pack.

On the one hand, the domestic sourcing requirements are beneficial because they are stimulating the development of local battery mineral refining and manufacturing here in the United States, adding well-paying jobs in the process. But the new rules have also significantly reduced the number of EVs that qualify.

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Pity the poor car dealers. After making record profits in the wake of the pandemic and the collapse of just-in-time inventory chains, they're now complaining that selling electric vehicles is too hard. Almost 4,000 dealers from around the United States have sent an open letter to President Joe Biden calling for the government to slow down its plan to increase EV adoption between now and 2032 .

Despite our robust economy, the US trails both Europe and China in terms of EV adoption. More and more car buyers are opting to go fully electric each year, although even a record 2023 will fail to see EV uptake reach double-digit percentages.

Mindful of the fact that transportation accounts for the largest segment of US carbon emissions and that our car-centric society encourages driving, the US Department of Energy published a proposed rule in April that would alter the way the government calculates each automaker's corporate average fuel efficiency. If adopted, the new rule would require OEMs to sell many more EVs to avoid large fines. This is in addition to an earlier goal from the White House that calls for one in two new cars sold in 2030 to be EVs.