> Because there's literally a market carve-out for city-driving electric cars like the Leaf and the BMW i-series.

And? Do you think these cars are incapable of highway driving? What do you think happens when manufacturers release cars that are terribly noisy in the cabin at highway speeds?

I’ll tell you: what’s always happened. Reviewevers and consumers will slag them off and people will vote with their wallets.

A lightweight car is not a car that inherently has to be unpleasant to drive at speed.

And you think cost cutting is new? Robert McNamara and his “whizz kids” near ruined the reputation of the Ford Motor Company due to quality issues stemming from his relentless cost cutting in the 1950s and 1960s. What he and, really, what the rest of Detroit were doing enabled the success of Japanese manufacturers in the USA because they made a higher quality product and charged less for it.

> And these days the over-reliance on plastics for structure and cost reduction

People have been complaining about this since the 1980s. Plastics have been used extensively in cars for decades, including in ways that compromise the durability of critical components and sensors. This is not a new problem.

It is sheer ignorance to claim that any car weighing less than a ton will inherently be unpleasant to drive at highway speeds.