I find the news article to be a little inaccurate. Why are so many people calling hybrids expensive? I remember back when California passed the ill fated zero emission standard and the first electric cars rolled into the car dealerships. All the left wing wacko news reporters in California were preaching about how this is going to be the future. No news reporter (at least not in "liberal" California) dared mock the ridiculous price tag of a car that costed double but could only deliver half the performance if even that.
Careful there. You have to keep in mind that:
a) those electric cars were at the time hand-assembled
b) their MSRPfrom the big automakers was placed as to represent what it would take to immediately recover all development costs within the first year of production under a mass production scenario. Normal gas cars don't have this done to them, otherwise they too would cost in excess of $60,000+ for their first model year from introduction. Meanwhile, small companies like Green Motor Works and AC Propulsion were hand-assembling EVs that were cost competitive with mass-produced ICE cars of similar acceleration performance. Think of what mass production could have done.
c) half the performance? Which performance parameters are you defining? EVs have an acceleration advantage over gas cars, producing peak torque at 0 rpm. The EVs that were slow(ie. that piece of shit, Ford Think) were due to a poor choice of drive system for a performance application, not the technology itself. OTOH, the GM EV1 could out accelerate a Corvette from 0-30 mph, and could do 0-60 in < 8 seconds(Corvette would have done overtaken it by this point), which for its time was better than 95% of the cars on the road. Range? Solectria's Force with NiMH batteries could do 200 miles per charge highway speeds, which was very close to the 250-450 miles demanded of gas cars on a full tank. Solectria's Sunrise, which in prototype quanities cost $100k, could nearly do 400 miles per charge, although poor choice of drive system that didn't use the full power potential of the batteries(150 horsepower or so potential, but it only used like 50 of that) made it dog slow.