I am in 100% agreement except the hybrid or all-electric.
I don't like the battery issue of the hybrids, or the issue of heat in winter. (We don't really "need" A/C here in Seattle and my current car doesn't have it.) Plug-is another issue, even though we have at present relatively cheap electricity and my commute is short enough that electric would work.
Get it down to the $5-8k range and this would become my primary commute/local-business vehicle (the nearest commercial businesses are some 5 miles away).
My commute is short enough that I’d be using it as an electric most of the time. The main benefit of a plug-in hybrid is that it would have more flexibility than an all-electric if I needed to run errands after work and didn’t have time to go home and fetch the real car.
I’m in Atlanta, where heat is often not a critical issue (though it was 19°F this morning, so it’s not exactly trivial). I could take my gasoline car on the few days of the year that it’s too cold to just wear a coat. Or an electric car could be outfitted with a separate propane or butane heater for those rare cold days.
I left out one option that T. Boone Pickens is big on — CNG cars. I already have methane piped right to my house, so a pump/compressor would be a nice home addition. A CNG hybrid could switch between gas and electricity, whichever is cheaper on a given day; both are domestically produced, so I could flip off the Saudis with every mile; and methane is sufficient to heat my house, so heating a car should be a non-issue.