In another era, before Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed its name to X to mark the spot of its descent into barbarism, honed Grok, a generator of far-right propaganda, swung behind Donald Trump and made what appeared to be a Nazi salute, I already knew he was a wrong ’un. The year was 2019, and I was test-driving a Tesla; while I was ambling off the forecourt, the PR told me jauntily that the windscreen was made of a material that would protect the driver from biohazards. I hit the brakes. “You what? What kind of biohazard? Like, a war?” She misconstrued me, thinking I intended to go and find some toxic waste site to see if it worked, and said: “I’m not sure it’s operational in the press fleet.”
That wasn’t my question: rather, what kind of a world was Tesla preparing for? One so unstable that an average (though affluent) private citizen would do well to prepare for a chemical weapons attack? What model of consumption was this, that the rich used their wealth to prepare for the mayhem their resource-capture would unleash, while the less-rich prepared slightly less well? Was Musk trying to bring to market the apocalypse planning that elites had already embarked on? Because if he was, then it was possible that he was not a great guy. And that turned out to be correct.
Tesla’s market share in Europe dropped precipitously in the EU in November, from 2.1% to 1.4% of new cars sold, which is likely to be consumers turning away from what Tesla represents, even the ones that agree with Musk. At an anti-Tesla protest at the side of a dual carriageway earlier this year, we got honks of support from actual Tesla drivers. Nobody buying one of these cars pre-2024 would have signed up to look as though they were supporting the owner’s agenda, which gets more and more strident. Meanwhile, the Chinese carmaker BYD recorded the fastest sales growth in November, and China’s state-backed SAIC, which owns MG, recorded sales growth of 26%. Hybrids accounted for nearly half of all sales. People haven’t fallen out of love with electric cars.
The arguments for and against EVs and hybrids are a neat distillation of a conversation we should be having constantly about all steps towards net zero. From a purist’s perspective, EVs are a red herring; we should be moving away from individual vehicles altogether, making lifestyle and infrastructure and 15-minute city adaptations so that we don’t need cars – making an emotional leap to the car as a purely practical item that a whole street could share, rather than something that conveys status or self-reliance and as such has to be held privately. We will not get to where we need to be by staying this dumb. There’s also an unavoidable practical dimension: the batteries need rare metals, which means that making EVs creates yet more emissions.
On the other hand, EVs offer clear proof that nobody is wedded to a fossil fuel lifestyle if something better comes along. And once something marginally better comes along, it constantly improves. No amount of corporate lobbying or teething trouble will stop people swapping out a worse thing for a better thing.
And electric vehicles are an incredible story of improvement. When I first reviewed a Nissan Leaf, it had to be delivered on a flatbed lorry, because the range was so tiny they couldn’t trust it would have enough charge after going 50 miles. Now the most basic model will go almost 300 miles. Solid-state batteries are going into trial next year with the promise of 500 miles on a 10-minute charge. I have severe misgivings about technological utopianism around climate breakdown: the hand-wavy insistence that human ingenuity will solve everything is often just a way to gate off collective energy and activism. But the advances in EVs outpace expectations by such a distance that it would be churlish not to notice.
Comically, the measure the petrolheads used to love, the macho bit of driving – nought to 60 – is better on electric vehicles, because they have fewer moving parts, less energy loss and deliver instant maximum torque. The infrastructure is better; public charging is getting more ubiquitous and private charging cheaper.
Maybe if we could be nuanced enough to acknowledge that we all need to change, but we can also take the win when it’s right there; that we all need to move past the market, but that market forces sometimes still work – that would have ramifications beyond cars. But the most important take-home is: don’t let Elon Musk taint the EV revolution, and don’t let him turn it into something other than what it is. It is not the story of imperilled individuals, hiding behind their top-dollar reinforced windscreens. Collective ingenuity has advanced what’s realistic, and realists do the rest.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
