Why is it that your Earth mostly doesn’t have electric cars? Answer: Because someone *might* need to make a 200-mile trip and the batteries for a 200-mile range are expensive. As has already been observed, you could solve that problem by using automatically piloted cars as a public transit network, with long-range cars only summoned for long-range journeys. So it is already understood, on Earth, that robotic cars are the key to electric cars.
So why doesn’t Earth have autopiloted cars? In the US one obvious answer is screwed-up liability laws, but not all countries are so hesitant. The real answer is that Earth only recently started to reach the AI level required to deal with other humans on the road, pedestrians randomly walking into the middle of the street, deer bounding across the avenues, whatever. But, and this I have not yet heard suggested here, you could solve that problem by having tunnels underground, instead of streets above, and all the cars auto-piloted. Then the AI problem would become vastly easier and could have been solved in the early 2000s of this Earth, if not earlier.
Current cars do not already travel through underground tunnels. Because your cars run on gasoline and would have filled the tunnels with choking fumes, without either (1) a big expensive ventilation system, or (2) expensive electrified rails that would…impose friction costs? Make it too expensive to keep the tunnels in repair? I know that dath ilan just used battery-powered cars in underground tunnels and didn’t bother with electrified rails.
So there is a circular dependency between electric cars that require autopilots, autopiloted cars that require closed predictable tunnels, and tunnels that require electric cars.
This Earth cannot resolve circular dependencies and almost always gets stuck in Nash equilibria.