NeilT,
So you don't see it. That's OK.
A couple corrections/comments to your post, anyway:
Tesla produced 76,000 cars in 2016.
Given that most owners' primary EV "gas station" will be in their garage, (and the average U.S. mileage is 40 miles/day), most EV owners will readily have all the charging infrastructure they need. Intra-city charging stations will fill in over the next few years as restaurants, hotels, stores, etc. come to realize a charger in the parking lot gets more customers through their doors. There are a little over 100,000 gas stations in the U.S., and about 10,000 charging stations thus far.
U.S car sales have flattened in recent years. Autonomous cars will eliminate the need for car ownership for many folks starting in the next year or two (depending on local regulations, but about 200,000 Tesla cars will be ready with full autonomy by the end of 2017, and other companies are close).
Tesla will show a semi-truck and "a new kind of pickup truck" (and an autonomous mini-van) this spring. Mercedes has a semi-truck concept, and Nikola One has 7,000 orders for its fuel cell semi. Short-haul semi-truck EVs (for near-port hauling) already exist:
https://chargedevs.com/newswire/orange-ev-now-taking-orders-for-its-new-t-series-electric-terminal-truck/Now, regarding Tesla:
One really can't compare Tesla with other car companies. Legacy car companies take 7 years to bring a new car to production, Tesla takes 3. Tesla built a gigafactory that will soon create more battery capacity than the
whole world made in 2013. The NUMI factory Tesla bought once produced 500,000 cars a year. Musk figured that he could increase that to 1 million cars a year with increased efficiency. And that was before he saw the demand for the Model 3, and got permits from Fremont to almost double the size of the plant! Announcements for the locations of gigafactories 2 and 3 (which will probably manufacture cars as well as batteries) in Europe and China are expected this year.
For the last year or so, Musk has been focussing on the "physics first principle" of manufacturing:
https://medium.com/@mark.tesla2/elon-musk-and-first-principles-thinking-e0035730d7"The factory capacity is “volume x density x velocity … and we use maybe 2 or 3%.” He is building his factories with "orders of magnitude" improvements in mind and says the factory he is working toward will look like nothing you've ever seen: "Alien Dreadnought 2.0." So, again, not comparable.
He even bought a German engineering firm to help ramp up production.
http://fortune.com/2016/11/08/tesla-buys-german-engineering-firm-to-ramp-production/Trucks? Money?
When asked about how Tesla would get money to finance the Semis, pickup and Model Y, Musk noted that this was all on a timeline and the Model 3 would be bringing in multiple tens of billions of dollars of revenue ($20B in 2020 alone) over its production run.
Finally:
Adoption?
Electric car ownership 'will be cheaper than conventional vehicles by 2022'. So anyone not looking to pay a premium for their car will be looking at EVs.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/25/electric-cars-will-be-cheaper-than-conventional-vehicles-by-2022. By that time, charging infrastructure will be ubiquitous, and fast-charging will be the norm, so inconvenience will no longer be a factor of significance to most people. And any kind of oil shock, or environment regs (after the next election
) will accelerate the switch to EVs.
Autonomy?
Autonomous car services really only make sense with EVs (they can be made to charge themselves; maintenance costs are much cheaper). Many more people will do without buying a car at all.
Just do it?
The Netherlands and California plan no ICE car sales after 2035. Germany, after 2030.
Norway, 2025. This is trending sooner, rather than later.
Feel free to reply if you like, but I believe I've said all I would like to say at this point!