Subsidies aren't necessarily a bad thing. Anything you get a tax break on is in reality a subsidy. Home ownership, child care, charitable donations, education - I could go on.

There's also nothing new about government offering subsidies to benefit specific industries or to incentivize specific behavior. You think the West would have been settled if not for the 160 free acres of land offered to settlers through the Homestead Act? Or that mining would have flourished if not for the "subsidies" (in the form of royalty-free minerals) in the General Mining Law of 1872? Or that the Transcontinental Railroad would have been built if the builders hadn't been granted big chunks of land in exchange for building track?

Depending on how you characterize it, the oil and gas industry is very heavily "subsidized" by the US taxpayer. From 1872 until the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, oil companies pumped tens of millions of dollars of oil out of public land and didn't pay so much as a single cent for it. Even the current scheme of oil and gas leasing has producers paying less in royalties than they would pay to private land owners, so that's a "subsidy" too.

And what are import duties on imported products if not a "subsidy" to the domestic producers of the same product (by giving a price break to the buyer of a domestic product?)

So I really don't have an issue with EV subsidies. I'm skeptical about the practicalities of EVs for all purpose use and I'm skeptical about the capacity of our current electrical grid to support widespread adoption of EVs. The other issue is that the current crop of EVs are suited for suburban-dwellers who have a garage and a place to plug in. Those who live in older neighborhoods, big cities, etc, where they have no garage, driveway or parking lot and might have to park 2 blocks away from their apartment - where do they plug in?