“When you ride Tesla, you ride with Hitler” according to a reworked second world war propaganda poster that was discovered in Oakland, California last month.
When did an electric car brand supposedly become associated with the far right? Perhaps when its CEO, Elon Musk, embraced Donald Trump and the Maga movement that propelled him to a second term as US president. Tesla dealerships have been targets for protests and vandalism, while the company’s sales and stock price have fallen recently.
“But those same political controversies may ironically help broaden the mass market appeal of electric vehicles,” says Hannah Budnitz, a research associate at the Transport Studies Unit of Oxford University.
“This is an industry that needs to go beyond the early adopter tech bros – and now might be the moment.”
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But first, a disclaimer
Around a fifth of the greenhouse gas emissions heating Earth can be traced to a vehicle exhaust pipe. The more combustion engines that can be replaced with electric batteries, the less getting from A to B will exacerbate climate change.
However, electric cars, like those sold by Tesla, are an imperfect solution to the climate crisis.
EPA-EFE/Erik S. Lesser
“Huge amounts of land which could otherwise be used to house people or be dedicated to nature are still reserved for roads and car parks,” says Vera O’Riordan, an energy policy researcher at University College Cork.
Read more:
Electric cars aren’t enough to hit climate targets: we need to develop better public transport too
And while driving an EV doesn’t emit CO₂, it does emit stuff you wouldn’t want to breathe in. Electric cars, which contain heavy batteries, wear down their tyres faster than conventional cars and generate more microplastic particles in the process, according to Henry Obanya, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Portsmouth.
Obanya estimates that as much as a quarter of all microplastics in the environment could have come from car tyres.
Read more:
Car tyres shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment – urgent action is needed
So, the strategy of putting an EV in every garage has its limits (not least the fact that not everyone has a garage, or the space to charge an electric car).
A more efficient way to decarbonise the second-largest emission source by sector (power generation is first) would be to follow the advice of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC, which is made up of scientists and other experts convened by the UN, recommends that countries plan their transport systems according to the maxim “avoid, shift, improve”.
This involves, O’Riordan explains, avoiding unnecessary journeys by designing towns and cities with amenities in walking distance, shifting passengers onto higher-occupancy vehicles like buses by expanding public transport and improving all travel options by switching from fossil fuels to electric propulsion.
Let’s assume that decades of car-first urban planning have boxed us in and we don’t have time to undo it before the climate is cooked. How can more motorists be persuaded to turn in their gas-guzzler for a battery-powered model?
It’s the price, stupid
Back to Budnitz – and the waning influence of the EV industry’s tech-bro boosters.
“In 2010, when Tesla became the first American carmaker to go public since Ford in 1956, fully electric cars were still a niche technology,” she says.
Read more:
Why the Tesla backlash could help electric cars finally go mainstream
Back then, Tesla adverts targeted the customers it thought would be early adopters: overwhelmingly, wealthy men like Musk. It worked. Survey after survey in North America and Europe showed that EV ownership in the early 2010s was skewed towards men and those on higher incomes.
This is in stark contrast to electric car marketing at the dawn of motoring. In 1900, petroleum-powered cars were in the minority (22% of all cars) and were widely considered temperamental “adventure machines” that were prone to breaking down. Electric cars were pitched as a safer, cleaner alternative that was perfect for city travel.
Perfect, in fact, for wealthy women. During the 1910s, when Victorian attitudes towards gender roles reigned and women were presumed to have limited mobility needs (no need to worry about your battery running flat if you’re not going far), 77% of EVs directly appealed to female consumers.
“In the short term, this was a successful strategy: car manufacturers that advertised to female consumers survived much longer,” says economic historian Josef Taalbi (Lund University). The only major electric car producer in the US to survive into the 1920s advertised to women, he adds.
In 2013, there were still less than 60,000 EVs on the road globally. A decade later, almost the same number are sold every day.
“The transition to electric personal mobility is well underway around the world,” says Budnitz. “Tesla’s troubles won’t stop this – but they can give the car industry an opportunity to make the messaging around electric vehicles more diverse, equitable and inclusive for the mass market.”
EV manufacturers can make their case to all drivers because they now offer a mass-market product, Budnitz argues. Nowhere is this more true than in Norway, which may become the first country to sell only zero-emission vehicles this year (88.9% of all vehicles sold in Norway in 2024 were fully-electric).
Zhang Yuliang/Xinhua/Alamy Live News
What’s Norway’s secret?
“Generous, comprehensive subsidies”, say Agnieszka Stefaniec and Keyvan Hosseini, transport researchers at the University of Southampton.
Read more:
How smaller, more affordable electric cars can accelerate the green transition
“Our recent research shows that affordability is a tool to get everyone on board. When lower-income households face affordability barriers, it’s not just their problem – it’s the missing link to achieving 100%. Smaller, more affordable electric cars could be the game changer needed to bridge this gap.”
