With the huge costs of these “virtue signaling” vehicle drivetrain changes,
wouldn’t make equal sense to mandate
making synthetic gasoline from electricity and carbon dioxide?

Remember that Exxon and Porsche are building a plant in the extremely windy southern part of Argentina to use windmill electricity to take carbon dioxide from the air and create 110 Octane rating synthetic gasoline that can be used in any “legacy” vehicle.

The Demon 170 would run even better on 130 Octane synthetic Triptane fuel.

Where there is little wind
solar, hydro or nuclear could be used.

If $ does not matter, why not satisfy activists by mandating an expensive fuel that will work in existing vehicle designs?

We have just experienced “an experiment” in Modern Monetary Theory
where huge amounts of currency was created electronically from thin air,
and the result “was only” ten percent inflation.
That has been pretty bad,
but “enduring” countries like Argentina and Zimbabwe
have demonstrated that inflation of 30% to 100% per year
can be “tolerated” over multiple decades,
although economic growth stops or reverses.

It would not be good
but it might be “less bad”
to go with legislating creating motor fuel from carbon dioxide and electricity,
and paying for it with electronically created money.

I say “less bad” because when the problems become undeniable to the nontechnical population,
it could more quickly reversed
by going back to gas wells, oil wells and coal mines.