This is my first post here at TMC but ive been following Tesla and this forum religiously for many years and even bought the stock when they did their IPO. Id like to first thank everyone here for all the great information, thoughts and analysis that the people of TMC share, it has been invaluable and incredibly interesting. So to the point, there are so many arguments against electric vehicles out there, most of which in my mind Tesla is currently in the process of solving, but one that has especially been bothering me is one proposed by (surprise surprise) John Petersen due to the research coming out of Norway a couple of months ago. He argued that electric vehicles was so "dirty" to produce that even if they were propelled by green electricity they would still not outweigh the effects the manufacturing of the vehicle had on the environment, compared to a regular ICE car. This does not sound very good to me, and I know that anything that comes out of John Petersens mouth is not to be trusted but still. The questions is what type of pollution is he exactly talking about, regular co2 emissions caused by the large amount of electricity required or some other type of pollution? If it is simply CO2 emissions caused by electricity use the obvious reason in my mind would simply be to have Teslas sister company install solar panels on the giant roof they have at the factory? Im actually quite surprised that they have not done this already simply out of the large savings that could be made, which obviously Elon is well aware of. I would love to hear your thought and input in regards to this!
It doesn't matter what you do, the Petersons of the world will just find a new point to attack (Have you stopped beating your wife yet?). The real solution is to get enough cars out there with very happy owners to make them [the Petersons] irrelevant. They will still spout their stuff, but the number of folks that will listen will be few.
That's been the plan for a while AFAIK, and the reason they haven't installed them yet according to Elon is that Solarcity is also quite backlogged.
Long Story Short: Elon should install Solar Panels on the manufacturing plant because the John Peterson's of the world argue Tesla isn't a green company because making the cars causes pollution. That's how it got linked in.
"in SolarCity's service territory nationwide" I wonder if they define this territory somewhere more explicitly... Also price and capacity would be nice to know.
Very cool, nice to see cross-branding through Elon's companies... next-up: Space-X components in Gen-III:biggrin:
[moderator's note: I moved the discussion about the environmental impacts of EVs vs. ICE vs. barefoot strolls over here: Study: Comparative EV to ICE environmental impact ]