Late Thursday night, Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk took the stage at the Tesla Design Studio to reveal the Tesla Model 3. “It’s very important to accelerate the transition to sustainable transport,” Musk said. “The last time there was this level of carbon concentration in the atmosphere was 11 million years ago.”
“Beyond global warming there are 53,000 deaths per year from auto emissions,” Musk added.
As much as I admire what Tesla is doing, the above is just bullshit. Electric cars – unless they are used in countries whose electricity comes from renewable energy – don’t reduce carbon dioxide, or auto emissions, they merely displace the pollution to the place that electricity is generated. In the US, much of the electricity people use is made from coal or oil. The only country where nuclear power is used for a majority of electricity is France (around 70%), but there is still the problem of nuclear waste.
Until renewable energy is ubiquitous, all these cars do is shift pollution to new locations. Sure, it’s better to get them out of cities, but if electric cars are to become common, every country in the world will need to ramp up their electrical production. Some countries can do this with renewable energy, many if not most cannot.
Oh, and apparently if you buy this car, you get a $7,500 tax credit from the federal government; or 20% of the cost of the car. So Tesla is sucking at the teat of big government, and, if the figure of 130,000 Model 3s ordered yesterday is correct, then this is costing taxpayers about $1 billion. All this for cars being bought by people who, for the most part, could afford to pay full price. That’s a pretty good scam Tesla has going… (Yes, the tax credits will decrease over time, but not until the US government has paid $1.5 billion toward Tesla cars.)
Source: Tesla Model 3 unveiled: 215-mile range, 0-60 in under 6 seconds, delivered in 2017 | Ars Technica UK