Dunno if this is discussed in the study; Nature is locked down and sci hub don't have it. But California EV leases were aggressive from 2012-2016, two thirds of the years studied. Manufacturers got emissions credits and tax benefits for dumping EVs in Cali. You could literally lease a Fiat 800 electric for $59 a month for 3 years for zero down, charger and everything. Then the Trump Administration came in and all that was donezo from 2017-2018. The incentive to buy or lease an electric vehicle went away. Housing in LA is also really shitty and got really shittier. No idea what percentage of people went from house to apartment or shared living to being on their own but chances are, if you don't have your own garage you don't have anywhere to plug in anyway. Buddy of mine paid $15k to put a Supercharger in his parking spot in his condo, which is not something you're going to do twice. Especially if that person moved out of California (again, don't know if they're tracking that).
Can't access Nature from home until after the weekend (maintenance), but donuts to oranges, the same data is all over here. Never forget: researchers like to re-publish their crap as many times as they can get away with it. Some of it might be in free access.
Yer a good man, Charlie Brown. Keep in mind I'm a cranky old man who doesn't have to access scientific papers for purposes other than winning Internet pissing matches. So yeah. This is a total bullshit study. 1) It does not distinguish between owned vehicles and leased vehicles. 2) They parsed 22 different demographic vectors but didn't even bother to break out the importance of incentives. 3) They make no acknowledgement of the aforementioned lapsing of lease incentives, nor of the fact that federal incentives for Teslas were cut in half in 2018. Tesla has a 4% marketshare of all vehicles in California, and lo and behold their sales were down 20% in CA in 2020. 4) Stupidest of all, though is no mention of this simple fact: if you had an electric vehicle from 2012-2017, you had a Clean Air Vehicle sticker and could rawk the carpool lane. But starting in 2018, you needed a new CAV sticker, which you could only get for a new car, which kicked 200,000 cars out of the HOV lane. So let's review. From 2012-2016 you could ride the carpool lane with a heavily subsidized vehicle. The subsidies went away in 2017 and the carpool lane went away in 2018. So now you're paying 50% more for a vehicle that costs 20% more to insure and yeah - as goobster points out, 80% of owners stuck with it anyway.
But you only need a charging station (or gas station, for that matter) every 300 miles or so. Why waste the land to have essentially a toxic waste dump - a gas station - every three blocks? Do those vehicles need carbon fuel so much that it is worth turning all that land into barren wastes? Why do you need an EV charging station on every corner? For most drivers they need to charge once a week or so. And electricity is EVERYWHERE. Gas is not. You have to go to a special building on a specific corner to get gas. And that's the ONLY place you can get it. You can get electricity anywhere. Still not seeing how electric cars are "impractical" when measured against vehicles that need a special type of fuel, only produced by a small number of companies, at a limited number of physical locations... the "gas" stuff seems pretty limiting to me.
Idk about your neighborhood but the only charging station in my town is at walmart. "Electricity" is everywhere, but are car charging ports? In the future this could change, but at this current moment in time owning an electric vehicle is impractical unless you have a garage to park your car in, or more than one charging port for a 10 mile radius.
I want you to try and engage with the deeper idea, here. You are so indoctrinated in the fossil fuel industry's talking points and fear-mongering, you don't even have a clear frame of reference to think about the issue. What is preventing ANY electric car from plugging in to electricity ANYWHERE? An extension cord. What is preventing a gasoline-engined car from refueling ANYWHERE? The limited availability of gas from only certain locations that are authorized to store and sell this extremely dangerous material called gas. Yes, the problem is more complex because the electrical grid in America is a shambles and was never designed to ... well, honestly, it was never actually designed ... it just grew as need grew. With an intelligent infrastructure plan in place that modernized our electrical grid, electric cars could be a critical part of the infrastructure and plan, and play an important role in storage of non-fossil fuel energy for off-hours consumption. Which brings me back to the 300 miles thing you chose to ignore, to keep spouting fossil fuel industry FUD that you have been successfully indoctrinated with ... the vast majority of Americans - something like 70% or more - don't drive 300 miles in a WEEK. So regardless what type of powerplant you have in your vehicle - an EV or ICE vehicle with approx 300 mile range between "fill ups" of either electricity or gas - which one is MORE LIKELY to find its "fuel" literally anywhere? The EV. Electricity is far more ubiquitous than gasoline, and all you need is an extension cord. No tanker trucks. No fuel tanks buried underground leeching toxins into the environment. No exhaust fumes. No oil refineries. No oil rigs toppling over in bad weather, or oil tankers crashing into Alaskan beaches. No wars for oil in places where brown people live. No more money flowing to Saudi Arabia or Aramco. All of that can be eliminated with a few (metaphorical) extension cords. See what I'm driving at here...?