Seated for the first time in an electric car – a Ford Mustang Mach-E so new it doesn’t have a sticker price yet – Mary Beermann has a broad grin on her face. She struggles to open the doors, the trunk, and even the cover to the connector plug – a boomer flailing in the push-button dawn of the electric-car age.

But none of this seems to daunt her.

“I think this is it,” she says. “This is my next car.”

It’s partly my doing, really. A few weeks earlier,...