Actually, I'm one of those gearheads you ask about. The experiments I do are being done on farm tractors instead, where weight is useful. There is an electric vehicle enthusiast genre, but it has few collector conventions or races (search "EV parts"). Partially because it's a luxury that few can afford to play at. My work on tractors and other machines is paid for (when it is) by early adopter organic farmers, but they're being pushed out by economics (it's an exponentially difficult problem to be innovating on top of innovating, dependent on affluent foodie innovators).

The fundamental problem isn't cars, it's consumptionism. Lead acid batteries can handle most commuting, and simple cars (search "commutacar/citicar" rather than heavy luxury yachts like Tesla could be built by golf cart companies. Corporations could be required to run buses. Most jobs are marketing and tax accounting bullshit that could just go away by implementing UBI based on VAT. Cities as we know them are CAFOs and should be defunded and evacuated from coasts. Population reduction has to be intentional or it will be collapsing from wars and disasters soon anyway. Then, we have to consider how we will reverse the last 120 years of depopulating rural areas that was enabled by petroleum.

The car problem is built on people living where they are useless to places and doing jobs that were conjured to put them there.