Good, that's the way it should be. If EVs are the future of personal vehicles (and I think they will be), then there's all the reasons to trade short term pain for long term gain.
That's assuming the market is homogeneous and resources are fungible. If interest in EVs in the US is low, nobody builds battery factories in the US. But we know China and others are. If it takes EVs another two decades to really catch on in the US, all the parts and materials will be foreign. Costs will be higher for domestic consumers, even if interest does pick up eventually. Catching up at that point may not even be possible.
Consider that if Asia and Europe manage to replace a majority of ICE vehicles in a decade or two with EVs, oil production will necessarily decrease in the end. We'll have a glut of cheap oil for a while as other countries buy less, which will artificially prop up ICE vehicles until production slows and costs go up. When gasoline inevitably becomes prohibitively expensive (assuming EVs are indeed the future), the US could be left with pricey fuel and no real ability to dig itself out of the hole it's created. It's not just the battery factories, it's the knowledge, talent, supply chains, trade deals, infrastructure, sales pipelines, patents, etc.
The "long term gain" turns out to just be us killing off our entire auto industry slowly. The "free market" in this case is actually "the free market here in our bubble". Globalization isn't going to sell cheap Chinese EVs in Montana, and people buying an $8000 BYD aren't going to look at a Chevy Malibu. If/when that market eventually collapses because we got left behind by the rest of the world, we'll be regretful that we didn't put subsidies into batteries and the grid. After all, we did subsidize oil and the auto industry for decades and decades for this reason. How many politicians stumped on the promise of keeping Detroit going?
Not to mention the market is bad at capturing externalities. Tax incentives are one way to offset externalities that the market doesn't price in. If tax incentive carrots are the "wrong way" to do it because they favor some companies more than others, then carbon/emissions taxes sticks are the "right way" to do it that provide a level "playing field" based on usage/consumption. (Arguably the most correct answer is "both" to get the "free-est market" with the most "information" about what society values priced into market supply and demand. Because "free" implies liquidity to follow the most "information" in the OG Adam Smith et al definitions, not free from incentives and disincentives.)
