The uh-oh of a charge point already having an EV on it - or worse, an ICE car that didn't read the sign, is already reported all the time at gm-volt.com. You're right about that one. With the Volt, the issue is the 120v charger they give you isn't worth plugging in during a visit to a neighbor, it just doesn't charge fast enough, you need a special high current 240v line for a faster charge (4.5 hours dead to full).
Ford is making a number of hybrids and plug ins here. They'll get there, they are just learning, but once they get going - look out.
They don't have GM's hypercool transmission (patents) though. GM's is continuously variable with no slipping clutches and very few parts, it's super neat design.
The big urban sprawl might work in the favor of a car that uses essentially no energy to wait in traffic. It does here with the Volt. I have two ways to get to Blacksburg (two towns over). One way is five miles shorter, but includes about 5 miles of highway at 65-70 mph (if you don't want to be run over), while the longer way is stop-go traffic, 45 mph max, 35 or so more normal. I can always make the round trip going the slower, longer way. Never have made it using the highway, either way. That wind resistance going up faster than the 3rd power of speed is killer (the Reynolds number makes it a little faster than just cubic).
You can of course, lease any car. It's a bit weird to just lease part of it...Has Renault really gone up in quality since they made the worse cars, even the worst French ones?
(which is saying something...having owned a Fiat, a Citroen, and an MG at one time or another) If they think that's a cool deal (for them) it might mean that leased battery outlives the part they insist on selling you outright!
By the way, the inflation tax (salaries constant or going down while everything you need goes up - but little to no inflation is reported because some things you don't need aren't going up, but down) - is not just in the UK, it's here too, bigtime. Our core inflation reporting completely leaves out food and energy....a joke, that's all I buy. But it includes housing, which I own outright, and it going down is used to "cancel" the super fast increase in health care costs...what a cheat (so if I have to sell my house to afford the hospital, I'm double-screwed). Or, better yet - since a new smartphone is twice as fast as the last model, but at the same price, our government, using "hedonics", says phones haven't gone up in price, but down! Ditto meat, since I've just switched, according to them, to cheaper chicken and never eat a steak anymore. This isn't the right thread for this - I rant on and on about it on another here...but that doesn't make it not-real. We are being screwed to pay for the mistakes of the large financial entities.
With what they've handed out to those guys, over and especially under the table, they could write a 100k check to every living person. That would be some stimulus! But that's not what they care about, it's taking care of the owners of the political system, which, in case you haven't noticed, isn't us.
Can you go to the fed, borrow money at 0.25% interest and use it to buy bonds that pay 3.5% with a government guarantee (no other collateral required either)? That's what I call under the table, quite profitable for the big banks as they can do it in size. It also enables overspending by governments to buy votes, since all that demand keeps the interest rate on bonds down to a mere 3.something percent here (unlike, say, Italy or Spain). What a scam! Makes me want to move to Iceland, where they at least had the guts to tell the bankers to do things where the sun don't shine.