Saving the world by buying luxury cars was always a painful example of first world thinking.

Elon Musk sold drivers on the myth that they could save the planet without changing their own habits. All they had to do was pay him. https://t.co/kx0In9YEtU

— Slate (@Slate) July 28, 2023

 

Following up on Monday's post ("The biggest automotive scandal since VW's Dieselgate and guess who's behind it... "), Edward Niedermeyer, the guy who literally wrote the book on Tesla, provides some important context for the company's latest scandal.

For much of the past decade, Tesla’s popularization of electric vehicles has centered on one innovation above all others: solving “range anxiety,” or the worry that your EV will run out of juice midtrip. By packing more batteries into its cars and establishing a fast-charging network, Elon Musk’s automaker sold the seductive idea that EVs could be a drop-in, one-to-one replacement for gas-powered vehicles. Today, that idea is the most fundamental orthodoxy underpinning the “EV transition,” shaping government policy and consumer tastes alike.

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From the very beginning, even before Elon Musk was involved with the company, Tesla’s vision was simple: put enough lithium-ion batteries into a car to give it blistering performance and long range. This resulted in a high-end product that was tailor-made to be marketed to the emerging tech elite, with the promise that the resulting high price would be magically reduced through scale and technological innovation. In a landscape of modest, short-range but still not cheap commuter EVs, Tesla’s gas-rivaling range (and later, fast-charging network) felt like a vision of a viable future and not just another hair shirt for environmentalists.

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Thanks to Tesla’s leadership, consumers are buying the biggest battery EVs they can, thinking that they’re saving the planet when they’re actually hoarding unused batteries to ward off their personal range anxiety. Because Americans only drive 40 miles a day on average, and because 95 percent of car trips are 30 miles or less, the range figures Tesla has normalized are wildly overkill and exacerbate battery supply chain issues that are only just starting to bite. Only wild inefficiency can make it feel like EVs can replace gas cars perfectly, and even then, with the best charging network available, long-distance journeys will still never be as fast and efficient as they are with gas cars, because it will always take longer to juice up an EV.

The big lie at the heart of Tesla’s big-battery approach is that EVs can directly replace gas cars without any real behavioral change on the part of consumers. But no matter how desperate the public and lawmakers are to believe this—it would be nice!—it simply isn’t so: Internal combustion and battery electric vehicles are fundamentally different technologies, with different strengths and weaknesses. No battery electric will ever be as good at unplanned, long-range trips in remote areas as a gas car, just as no gas car will ever refill its tank overnight.

Instead of following Tesla’s lead and getting into a battery-size arms race that will make the future of cars even more expensive, oversized, dangerous, and wasteful than they already are, we simply need to accept that the market must change. Instead of giving the biggest incentives to the biggest batteries, government policy should focus on electrifying the vast majority of daily trips, which start and end at home and could easily be handled by vehicles with 100 miles of range or less. That means incentivizing home charging, not the roadtrips that make up a tiny percentage of trips, and nudging consumers toward using the smallest battery possible for those regular trips. That means incentivizing e-bikes, plug-in hybrids, and other small battery electric vehicles, not holding fleet electrification hostage to the 5 percent use cases.

Musk's promise of salvation without sacrifice has found an eager audience with the technocratic wing of the pundit class, as has the rest of hiss mythology. The idea of Musk and Musk-like tech messiahs  support Noah Smith's gospel of abundance.

It required entrepreneurs like Elon Musk to invest their lives and their fortunes in battery companies that pushed down the cost of batteries through mass production and scale effects, rather than starting companies that made death drones or ad tech.

Musk buys his batteries from Panasonic then lies about their performance. (We'll get into the whole bursting-into-flames thing some other time.)

Vox's David Roberts bought the full service "Musk is not in it for the money." PR package complete with SolarCity scam. Roberts' credulity became a bit easier to understand when I got to this: " (For insight on Musk, see Ashlee Vance’s biography or this invaluable series on Wait But Why.)" 

Vance's book is deeply problematic, a largely trusting account of a serial liar, but at least it looks good in comparison to the WBW posts, which start with an entry entitled "Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man." Things go down hill from there.

Lots of people are now catching on that Musk was and is a con man whose reputation rests on claiming credit for things that were either done by other people or simply made up, but for many of those people there's a lag. They haven't come to terms with the possibility that Elon wasn't a tech messiah because there are no tech messiahs.