battery cell costs down to $125 at tesla gigafactor and gm/lg

Well for now; I just did some back of the napkin price comparison between the 70kWh & the 90kWh Model X. The upgrade is somewhere around $12k - $13k. For the extra dough, you'll travel between 35miles-50miles, turning on speed. That's a big difference. Of course along with that upgrade, comes a few other goodies like heated wipers, heated steering wheel, heated rear seats etc. And the amount of quick charge is larger before it tapers off. Yes, it'd be nice if that 20kWh jump came at a cost of 'only' $145/kWh.
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So why are tax payers paying $417 per kWh when the cost is a third?

 

Maybe like buying the latest iPhone - early adopters pay the premium that covers the R&D?
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NREL gets government funds for battery R&D.

This is like $900 tax credit for buying an iPhone for what cost Apple $300 to make.

iPhone owners made out with profit. Apple made the most profit. Tax payers lose.

 

not sure i get the point - over a relatively short time, price, power, weight issues are dropping. So should we be up in arms because battery price/power/weight used to be higher?
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Taxpayers aren't.
Some taxpayers (the ones that buy plugins) are paying less money to the government.
Now, if you want to talk about all taxpayers footing the bill, all taxpayers contributed to basic research. Or, you can look at how all California taxpayers are paying for hydrogen stations.

 

California Taxpayer Subsidizing Electric Charging Stations ...

CA EV Charging Station Network Imploding - Breitbart

 

This is such a faulty analogy, you do see it, don't you?
First, your original statement is incomplete. Not all plugin vehicles get a $417/kWh credit. What you left out was the minimum ($2500) and maximum ($7500).
If you want to only mention the $/kWh and omit the minimum and maximum, to be accurate you need to list cars separately. For example, the 90D Models S gets a rebate of $83.33/kWh.

Meanwhile, the plugin Prius gets a rebate of $568/kWh.

Your iPhone comparison is rather silly since the example you give has the rebate being more than the entire product the battery is contained in, which is not the case for plugin vehicles. By the way, the closest would be the PiP at $568/kWh.

Good point, some California taxpayer money does go towards a minor percentage of infrastructure for EVs.
Again though, this is a very small amount per car and is a very small part of the infrastructure.

 

closing in on 20 trillion debt, it's all funny money anyway.

 

California Dupes Taxpayers into Building the Hydrogen Highway
The great thing with funding EV costs is that it's working - as evidenced by the $125 price drop. Hydrogen cars are still the same albatross they were decades ago. Now that batteries cost less, the fuel stacks can be made smaller - which is a driving force to bringing down fc costs .... all the way down to ~ $100,000 a piece (not counting manufacturers' losses), for a compact/4 seater ... not that this helps much to the average buyer.
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