I can't imagine why an EV should be so expensive. Yes, the battery is expensive, but the rest should be mechanically much simpler and easier to build. ICE manufacturers should be easily able to use their existing platforms and manufacturing methods and CAN bus systems and so on and build an electric drive train with it. The battery is expensive, but installing the battery and drive train should be much easier than an ICE. Just leave out all the stupid software bullshit and bring back the most basic displays: Range, charge, charge change rate, speed. Add a radio that has Bluetooth connectivity and some climate controls with physical buttons and that's it, nothing else is needed.
Tooling, Battery costs, and subsidies.
Traditional engines have been around
Forever (as far as the engineering world goes), and the tooling for these are extremely mature, so you can start a brand new ICE brand/factory by mostly buying mature tooling, and asking your favorite chinesium fab to manufacture dies for you to cast your engines, every other part has been solved.
Things like structural battery packs, newer transfer cases that can handle instant immediate extreme torque,
MUCH heavier cars, all of that requires a different engineering approach, and most car companies aren't just resistant to change, they despise it like no tomorrow. They'll spend much more time, effort, and money trying to make an EV that shares most parts with ICE cars rather than biting the bullet and rolling out proper tooling.
Tesla rolls their own tools, specialized for their cars, it's less versatile (and also why all teslas look the same) but much cheaper.
Up until recently, only hybrids carried batteries, so you had very few high capacity manufacturers, and those "high" capacities were only a few kilowatts, the highest capacity batteries hovering around 25kWh, basically jackshit.
Now, you have specialized manufacturers doing research into new chemistry, new formats, etc, and all of this needs to be amortized, rising the price of batteries to the tens of thousands of dollars per unit, B2B price.
Here, Tesla is still unique in rolling and packing their own batteries, pretty much halving the cost per kWh on their end
Lastly, for subsidies, manufacturer build their cars, target a price after seeing the build price, then slap on the subsidies on top, because subsidies are retarded.
TL;DR: OEMs make new tools, must amortize cost, OEMs make and research new batteries, must amortize cost, Subsidies are free money manufacturers can slap on top of the price for no consequence.
