Its not a "bear article". Its actually the common criticism of Musk from the left.
The idea essentially is that climate change can't be tackled with cars at all - only with public transport.
I personally think both are needed. Its unfortunate that Musk completely ignores public transport (except one could say for hyperloop).
For public transport, the new ideas need to be sold to politicians and only a few people can stop all progress. Replacing diesel buses with electric is the easiest problem and that requires building infrastructure for the electric buses. Long range fast rail is what is truly needed in the US, and that has been bogged down for decades. Cities that are trying to put in their first light rail systems now are struggling. Portland is doing well (they got started a while back, but more recently than cities like Chigaco and New York), but light rail in Seattle has been a mess.
Tesla, but selling electric cars, sells the public directly on electric transportation. Once a significant portion of the public is sold on the idea, then getting public projects done will be much easier. Tesla is working the Hyperloop technology and it will probably be ready around the time the public is really ready for high speed electric rail between cities.
Currently what EM has given us is 50k+ cars. The initial boring ideas were to speed up the time those cars took to travel.
Neither of them help the median income person in anyway.
The limiting thing with electric vehicles is the price and density of battery tech available today. You're up against the laws of Physics and economy. Tesla is doing everything it can to bring down the price, but there is only so much they can do for density. The batteries used in Tesla cars today are about 1/30 the energy density of gasoline and currently there is nothing we can do about that.
To make a practical car capable of 300 miles range, it has to be a certain size to hold the batteries needed. The Model 3 is a marvel of packaging to cram as much battery capacity into the smallest space possible, and still have good temperature control.
To be able to make any profit on a 300 mile EV, it also needs to be expensive because the batteries cost more than an ICE right now. I've heard the Bolt described as a $20K Chevrolet Sonic with an $18K electric drive train and battery added (the Bolt has its own platform, but is evolved from the Sonic/Spark/Opel Corsa platform).
It's basically impossible to make an EV today that would be appealing and priced in the middle of the price range for ICE without losing your shirt in the process.
