Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Electric Vehicles

I Hate What Elon Musk Did to Twitter. I Bought a Tesla Anyway.

I shopped around, but nothing came close to the Model Y.

Elon Musk and a Tesla.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

My wife Deb and I had been thinking forever about what electric car to get.

We followed the news about electric models from Hyundai, and Kia, and Cadillac, and Polestar, and all the others. We noted every ad on TV and every story about upcoming releases. We asked Uber and Lyft drivers who had electric cars what they liked and disliked. One time a friend let us test drive his Polestar for a few days. (It was great.)

And we decided on Tesla.

We made our choice even though I consider Elon Musk’s role at Twitter to be wholly destructive, and even though I have followed the cautionary stories about Tesla as a company and about its “self-driving” technology and other systems.

So why the Tesla Model Y? Here was our check list:

1. Scale. Tesla is for now the market leader in the U.S. and some other parts of the world. When we were in the Bay Area of California earlier this summer, a huge share of the cars we saw on highways 101, 80, and 280 were Teslas. During the first quarter of this year, Tesla’s Model Y, the same kind we got, was California’s best selling vehicle of any sort — cars, trucks, hybrids, gas-powered, whatever. In second place was another Tesla, the Model 3.

I have a long track record of going against the grain in consumer selections. Time and again I’ve chosen the “interesting,” “elegant,” “actually, better value” alternative to the market leader. When first the Apple II and then the early IBM PC were coming onto the computer market, I proudly stuck with gorgeous-but-doomed outliers like the Processor Technology SOL-20 and the Victor 9000. I used the “technically superior” operating system OS/2 when the world was switching to Windows. I wrote several books with DeScribe as a word processor, rather than Word. Now I use Scrivener.

This is to say, I’ve explored the road less traveled.

This time we decided to go with the herd. There are real advantages of industry-standard scale. The most obvious is Tesla’s nationwide network of charging stations, which other companies are now joining.

2. Availability. Many articles about electric cars talk about multi-month waiting lists, or models that will come onto the market in a year or two.

We decided: The future is now. For better or worse, Tesla has a lot of inventory on hand for fast delivery. We brought ours home less than two weeks after we took a test drive and listed the specs for the model we wanted.

3. Price. This was a surprise. Usually I have terrible timing as a consumer. For instance, we bought our house when mortgage rates were around 20%. But we happened to be shopping just after Tesla had cut prices significantly to build sales volume, and to stay below a price ceiling that qualifies for federal tax credits. Prices went up again slightly a few weeks after we’d placed our order, but not nearly as much as they’d previously gone down.

This leads to…

4. Taxes. According to Tesla, our car was manufactured in Austin and shipped for delivery to where I live in Washington, D.C. This and other factors qualify the car for the current $7,500 federal tax credit for domestically produced electric vehicles.

This provision does not apply to cars from Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes, Polestar, and so on. Therefore it gives Tesla (plus GM, Ford, Jeep, etc.) a big edge.

After tax credits, the final cost to us was well under the average price for a new car in the U.S. And, inflation-adjusted, it was actually less than the price of my last beloved car, an Audi A4 I purchased back in 1999.

5. Vibe. This will mainly be my wife’s vehicle — I’m sticking with the Audi as long as D.C. inspection allows. For her it has just the layout, size, and space she had been looking for.

More importantly, she likes it — the look, the feel, the ride. I like it too.

There you have it! But then…

6. The Elon Factor. I believe that Elon Musk has damaged public discourse with his dismantling of Twitter and his related forays into politics. Naturally this makes me wonder about everything else he has been associated with.

What if there had been a comparably attractive choice — on price, availability, scale — from a company he didn’t run? We would have taken that. But there wasn’t.

The reality is that Tesla has transformed the electric-vehicle market in the U.S. We’re aware of the man but chose the car.

Some day, the beloved A4 will no longer pass D.C. inspections, or no longer get by on its aging, hard-to-replace parts. When that day comes, I’ll see what new EV models have appeared.

For now, we’re Tesla people.

Note: A version of this article originally appeared in the author’s newsletter, Breaking the News, and has been repurposed for Heatmap.

Blue

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Spotlight

Trump’s Onshore Wind Pause Is Still On

Six months in, federal agencies are still refusing to grant crucial permits to wind developers.

Donald Trump and a wind turbine.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Federal agencies are still refusing to process permit applications for onshore wind energy facilities nearly six months into the Trump administration, putting billions in energy infrastructure investments at risk.

On Trump’s first day in office, he issued two executive orders threatening the wind energy industry – one halting solar and wind approvals for 60 days and another commanding agencies to “not issue new or renewed approvals, rights of way, permits, leases or loans” for all wind projects until the completion of a new governmental review of the entire industry. As we were first to report, the solar pause was lifted in March and multiple solar projects have since been approved by the Bureau of Land Management. In addition, I learned in March that at least some transmission for wind farms sited on private lands may have a shot at getting federal permits, so it was unclear if some arms of the government might let wind projects proceed.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Climate

AM Briefing: EPA Reportedly to Roll Back Power Plant Emission Regulations Today

On power plant emissions, Fervo, and a UK nuclear plant

EPA Will Reportedly Roll Back Power Plant Emission Regulations Today
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: A week into Atlantic hurricane season, development in the basin looks “unfavorable through JuneCanadian wildfires have already burned more land than the annual average, at over 3.1 million hectares so farRescue efforts resumed Wednesday in the search for a school bus swept away by flash floods in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.

THE TOP FIVE

1. EPA to weaken Biden-era power plant pollution regulations today

EPA

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Politics

Why Big Tech Is Keeping Quiet on Clean Energy

Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and the rest only have so much political capital to spend.

Tech company heads.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

When Donald Trump first became a serious Presidential candidate in 2015, many big tech leaders sounded the alarm. When the U.S. threatened to exit the Paris Agreement for the first time, companies including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook (now Meta) took out full page ads in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal urging Trump to stay in. He didn’t — and Elon Musk, in particular, was incensed.

But by the time specific climate legislation — namely the Inflation Reduction Act — was up for debate in 2022, these companies had largely clammed up. When Trump exited Paris once more, the response was markedly muted.

Keep reading...Show less