Tesla was a giant step backwards for electric cars

Greg Bryant
March 30, 2023

We had one opportunity to reduce the size, speed, and number of automobiles on the road, and instead to promote public transport, shared transport, and ecological urbanism. 

What was that opportunity? The era, in this century, when people were motivated to do something about their transportation, so they'd do their part to mitigate the global climate crisis. 

That included using public transport, walking, and riding lighter, safer vehicles: bikes, scooters, and cars that were as tiny as possible. 

In 2009, the electric car was still a small, gentle idea, which you could write a children's song about, portrayed in animation by a harmless little cardboard box.

But Elon Musk almost single-handedly ruined that opportunity for the world. 

Because of him, people with power came to advocate for public support for, and purchase of big, luxurious, fast, heavy, dangerous, supposedly high-tech private cars. And now they're now advocating for autonomous vehicles: equally destructive because, even if they worked without hurting people, they extend the public dedication of space and infrastructure to cars.

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When I first bumped into a young Elon Musk, in Palo Alto in 1999, I didn't want to meet with him. Or talk with him. I'll explain why in a minute.

I saw him, and his fiancé, all the time. We were neighbors. We shared a landlord and a favorite café -- the redundantly-named University Coffee Café. Conference room space was rarely available in downtown Palo Alto, so cafés became the place for meetings. We both held forth, at nearly adjacent tables, almost every day during an intense period of the dotcom boom. We overheard each other's pitches often enough that, if we ignored our very different values, we probably could have swapped places.

But he was obviously just an ambitious kid, obsessed with PR stunts, money, power, and the wrong kind of whiz-bang science-fiction. He worked to obtain the influence and privilege he felt he deserved, and which his many schemes promised him. So I'd never have imagined that later ... hilariously ... people would consider him an environmentalist!

Why was that silly? Because, during the dotcom boom, he drove a million-dollar racing car around the residential streets of Palo Alto -- a McLaren F1. When he was in a hurry, he parked it right in front of my desk, because I was always there, facing the outdoors, and he knew it. I was behind a ground floor window of my busy, gregarious start-up, a few houses from his, facing the street. He tacitly supposed that this race car, his egregious waste of resources, was safely watched. But ... if someone had set it on fire, I would have cheered, since our neighborhood would've been safer as a result. As it turned out, he crashed it himself.

That same sociopathy (sometimes misdiagnosed as "entrepreneurship") led him to crash the potential of the electric vehicles, and the world is worse for it. Yes, I know it's an outrageous statement. But it's also obviously true. "Fast and fancy" was not the right role for electric vehicles -- despite its distracting market success -- if we want to act in the interest of nature and the human community.

Below: A rich person's dangerous, gaudy Tesla crap, paid for by the rest of the world.

It should be illegal to manufacture, possess, or drive any car that goes so fast, accelerates that quickly, distracts their passengers with bright touchscreen displays, and disconnects them from the world by sinking them into plush seats with small windows ...

In fact, if one wants to do good for the world, it's best to understand this: people almost never need private cars. 

Mass transit, even in the suburbs, is a much more efficient use of land and fuel. The housing grid of LA was originally created with streetcars, not cars. Automotive oligarchs disrupted mass transit, and changed land development policy, on purpose. Now we're stuck with countless streets, highways, and parking lots, choked with traffic and pollutants, burning fossil fuels, fracturing our world, killing, maiming, and frightening us. And we're destroying the rest of the earth, stealing its resources and labor, to accomplish this. All for increasing the wealth of an vanishingly small percentage of the global population.

But, back to Tesla's destruction of the electric car.

Before Tesla, there was a delicate trend towards modest, economic, compact EVs. Cars whose drivers could see pedestrians very easily. Cars that were so small, they had only a small chance of hurting a pedestrian or bicycle. These were community-responsible vehicles. We need public transit, but, the small EV was an environmental transition vehicle, in a country where the transport infrastructure is so warped that people don't even feel they can live without a car. A tiny compact car kills far fewer people. Its impact with other cars is far less deadly. And it's much more efficient than a large car.

Everyone who genuinely needs a car (I'm not counting work vehicles, actively carrying equipment and materials) only needs such an economy car. The first modern electric cars in the 21st century were compact economy cars. They should be as small as possible. 

Living as we are, in a fossil-fueled ecological disaster, this was the direction that any remaining cars should have taken: safer, less obnoxious, less extravagant, closer to people, nature, and surroundings, taking less space, weighing less, etc.

That's still the ideal transportation mix: pedestrians first, then bicycles, workbikes, tiny vehicles, scooters, mass transit, occasional shared vehicles, and work vehicles.

This critically important agenda -- this goal of "a good mix" -- was set back decades by Tesla. We're now in an arms race of ever bigger, deadlier electric cars. When Tesla made fast-and-fancy sedan-sized electric cars popular, everyone wanted one, so everyone started making them, clogging our streets with muscle-laden electric "wank-panzers", following the worst trends of the gas-powered cars ... 

... and now fancy giant electric cars are on the market. Because of batteries, those are even heavier (and hence more deadly) than their monstrous fossil-fueled brethren. In most places in the world, they even consume more fossil fuel, since the increasing electricity demand is met by burning methane. In Oregon, fossil gas generates nearly half of our electricity, and this is increasing, even though most people think we're a 100% hydroelectric state. (To be fair, that's not solely the fault of the EV industry: for example, tech datacenters in eastern Oregon, which want to be considered "green", are eating up a growing share of the hydroelectric and other renewable electric power in the state, even though that capacity is growing).

With all these giant, bubble-isolated, high-rolling, heavy cars, our streets are noticeably more crowded and deadlier. Fewer pedestrians or cyclists feel comfortable in an automobile-dominated environment, and so they tend to get in a car, a big one if they can. Marketing hype and profits have, once again, temporarily triumphed over common sense.

Today, the whole world needs to follow the original agenda. 

Now is the time to simply de-car, since the climate emergency is making us reconsider everything. 

We went through this decades ago, and now we have regressive revivals from big industry. So it needs to be said again: fleets of cars, nuclear power plants, skyscrapers and rocket ships have NO role in a fair and ecological future.

In the domain of transportation, there are two sets of forces, competing against each other: 

(1) the dangerous world of automobiles -- with other drivers, intoxication, phones, glowing dashboards, and other distractions -- with increasing traffic of heavier and more deadly vehicles

2) the desire for our cities to be car-free, pedestrian-friendly, safe from traffic, more nature-and-people oriented, beautiful, and comfortable. 

Let's make sure the cars don't win!!

Below: The best part of Utrecht's eco-transportation dream doesn't include any four-wheeled vehicles at all ... and certainly doesn't include fancy electric cars, giant electric trucks, or wasteful autonomous taxis.