Europeans are a special bunch. They’ll complain about the environmental impact of a large EV truck, but they’ve had no issue being the biggest supporters of diesel cars/trucks. You can’t make this stuff up....
Blaming
Europeans as a collective - or even European regulators to an extent - for supporting diesels is a bit problematic, considering that they were lied to (although they do have slightly superior CO2 emissions performance compared to non-hybrid gasoline vehicles (not hybrids though, and not EVs), although some automakers have caught up most of that gap with much lower-cost technology than diesels need). Then organizations figured out that the criteria pollutant emissions performance was a lie, and diesel support is evaporating. (I
will blame European regulators for some massive loopholes in NEDC that the automakers successfully lobbied for, but then, those loopholes weren't just used for diesels, they were also used for gasoline cars, and I'd be wholly unsurprised if some of the legacy automakers' EVs have using them as well. In any case, due to Dieselgate bringing attention to those loopholes, WLTP+RDE attempts to close them.)
And, plenty of entrenched interests are releasing FUD-laden studies (use Chinese manufacturing processes that aren't optimized to minimize emissions and use coal power, and then apply those results to a Tesla+Panasonic cell made with cutting-edge processes to minimize emissions, and made with renewable electricity), those FUD-laden studies get picked up by well-meaning metastudies, and that perpetuates further lies (sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally).
Additionally, a truck large enough to compete with American full-size pickups will almost certainly be too large to work well for most of the European market (I know KarenRei has said that Iceland is an exception, and I suspect there's other parts of Northern Europe that are exceptions). This creates problems for parking, road width (something American width can easily end up not fitting in some areas), safety (more mass means more danger to people walking, on bicycles, and in smaller cars, and an "armored personnel carrier" doesn't sound like something designed to work well for pedestrian crash safety regulations), as well as energy consumption (which, yes, doesn't matter
as much with renewables... but it still matters, especially if you're supply-limited on renewables (in which case people adopting vehicles with excessive energy consumption because they're "cool" actually
slows down the transition to sustainable energy)).
I've said before, I see Tesla as harm reduction. The best thing is to optimize cities for
people, not cars, and have efficient, frequent, and clean mass transit, and safe, useful cycling infrastructure. But, you're going to have a lot of situations where cars and trucks are unavoidable (whether because people are doing things where mass transit is simply impractical and distances are too far for cycling, or because they simply won't give up their car and in fact will move further out from the urban core to keep their car), and that's where Tesla (automotive) comes in, to make that more sustainable than it currently is.
People who don't currently have or need trucks rushing out and buying Cybrtrks actually does reduce sustainability from the baseline.
