There's a great market out there willing to buy B-movie space ships, but if EVs are going to be the default (and I think they are) they're going to have to get over the toys and start shipping cars.
It didn't save the Lightning from being canceled, but at least they pumped out a hundred thousand of them or so before turning tail and giving the market to GM.
A Mazda 3 has been my daily driver for the past decade and I really wanted to like the Mazda CX90 PHEV when I was buying a larger vehicle last year. It was pretty difficult to justify the CX90 PHEV, though. It gets 42 km of range on an 18 kWh battery (2.4 km/kWh). For comparison, the EV9 I ended up purchasing gets 450 km of range on a 100 kWh battery (4.5 km/kWh).
Don't get me wrong. The CX90 PHEV is still the most efficient CX90 by a wide margin. I had seriously considered buying one, but the efficiency was a deal-breaker. I don't love the giant touch screen on the EV9, but I can live with it. If I couldn't, I would have gone with the Ioniq 9 for more physical controls.
The 2026 Leaf, which is based on the same platform, is pretty good in this regard too.