Disgust at the CEO’s rightwing activism is casting a pall but conservatives are no more likely to buy EVs
US liberals have become so disgusted with Tesla since Elon Musk’s rightward turn that they are now not only far less likely to purchase the car brand but also less willing to buy any type of electric car, new research has found.
The popularity of Tesla among liberal-minded Americans has plummeted since Musk, Tesla’s chief executive and the world’s richest person, allied himself with Donald Trump and helped propel the president to election victory last year.
While liberals reported mostly positive intentions around buying an electric car in August 2023, their overall support for EVs eroded in the wake of a collapse in their opinion of Teslas, according to the new study, which polled Americans on an array of environmental actions.
Once again, this time everybody join in, “electric cars aren’t here to save the planet they’re here to save the car industry.”
Electric vehicles don’t really solve any of the problems that cars have. They just shift the resource and environmental problems into a different arena.
It seems to me that the most effective way of dealing with personal vehicles is to use renewable power to produce gasoline (Blue crude).
That way your gasoline is carbon neutral or even carbon negative until you burn it, can actually be kept sterile and separate and only mixed on demand so it doesn’t go bad, and never has any sulfur in it because it’s made from scratch.
It also means that all of the vehicles that currently exist can still be used which would dramatically reduce the amount of energy necessary to keep a functional fleet of vehicles and doesn’t need everything to be replaced including the infrastructure.
Peaker plants could be built to soak up all of the extra renewable power when production is so much higher than demand so there’s no need to worry about where you get the power to do this.
There are solutions out here but they require a kind of rearrangement of how we do business at almost every level.
Electric cars are so much more efficient than gas cars that I can’t see how “Blue Crude” could ever get even close in terms of emissions. Electric cars are so efficient that if you converted the size of their batteries to gallons of gas, most of them would have a tank smaller than 4 gallons. Why would we keep using such inefficient engines just to try and recapture that carbon out of the atmosphere when we could just never emit it in the first place?