I am NOT an Elon Musk fanboy, but I'm not a hater either. I am exceedingly appreciative of what he has done in the area of electric vehicles. The reason why is because of my experiences in the field of EVs. Who I am is a person who has promoted electric vehicles from way before they were even a twinkle in the eye of public awareness in modern times. I have been writing about their benefits for more than two decades now, however, my first interest in electric vehicles started during the OPEC oil embargoes in the 1970s, when a car dealer, inspired by golf carts, put similar but more powerful components into a cheese wedge shaped two seat enclosure with wheels. What is pictured above. The person was Bob Beaumont, his company was Sebring Vanguard and his vehicle was the Citicar. I was a child living in Bethesda, Maryland and some of my neighbors managed to get a few of these vehicles. They tooled around our suburb to get groceries and run errands. For me this car helped me see a possible solution to the problem of gasoline and oil. If you remember the 1970s you would remember that gasoline and oil shortages dominated all of our minds at the time.
In the mid-1990s my mind went back to thinking about electric vehicles again. There was the ever encroaching price volatility of gasoline prices that could wipe-out ordinary people's disposable income in an instant. That ever present random economic shock from gas prices looming over our economy had dampened economic growth for working class people. There was also big oil's heavy handed meddling in politics. The dangers of poor air quality and climate change were beginning to become evident, growing and becoming part of the public consciousness. All of these things lead to my feeling that there was an urgent need to end petroleum's hold on our lives. I could also now clearly see that these weren't just US problems but problems that affected everyone around the globe.
In the 2000nds my politics had changed from having been business oriented and more neoliberal like to seeing the problems that big business presented and the need for much more government intervention to mitigate big business excesses. Ironically this began apart from but while I had embarked on an MBA program. Given that my point of view was changing I tried to move the focus of my MBA from generic management to the management and marketing of renewable resources and alternative energy. Unfortunately, way back then there wasn't anything like what I was thinking of doing. In fact, the curriculum was downright hostile to that way of thinking. For instance, in one of my textbooks there was an essay/sample study about how you should never attempt to start an electric vehicle company. This anomaly of a thing in my textbook was directly at odds with the research I was doing. Lucky for me it didn't deter me from making alternative fuels as the focus my research and as the subject of my thesis. And doubly fortunate for me was that my professor didn't beg me off of what I wanted to do with my thesis. I think he was curious of what I would discover, and probably hoped that what I was doing was going to be different from all the other papers and thesis he would have to read through.
Along with my making alternative fuel my school obsession, my research in the field made me want to share what I was learning with more than my teachers and my class. I began to write articles on what I was finding and then trying to get them published in the mediums of the day, which were newspapers and magazines. I didn't get anything published in them, however, I did manage to get a reporter to interview me and to write about what I had written. Unfortunately, my essay was over her head and she couldn't understand much about what I had written. She ended up referring to me as an EV frankinfan because she couldn't understand things like automated plug-in devises, ultracapacitors and such. With no luck getting published by traditional means I found myself just wanting to find people who could understand the stuff I was learning about. I found and joined the local electric vehicle club, the members of which really were my people and I felt at home with them. I also found websites and groups in California who were not just enthusiastic about electric vehicles, but politically active in making them a thing. They wanted to make them a thing for the same reasons that had made me change my politics.
These Californian groups had access to production EVs that we in the rest of the country didn't. They had access to the EV1 and other electric vehicles made possible by California's Zero Emissions Mandate. And later, when the mandate was destroyed by political meddling by powerful business interests, and as a result nearly all of the electric vehicles were rounded up and crushed or shredded, these people protested in a very public way. While they were running a vigil in Burbank to save a bunch of EV1s being staged to be shipped to the crusher, I was online from the east coast on the website they were using to coordinate their activities giving them arguments to use to counter what GM used as reasons for destroying these EVs. In the end we were unsuccessful in saving the EV1s there. We were also unsuccessful in saving most of the EVs from that era. Some Toyota Rav4 EVs made it through to individual hands, and some Chevy S-10 EV pickups, but not much more. No fully intact EV1s survived in private hands. A film maker was among the California activists. His name was Chris Payne. He pieced together much of what went on during this time and used it to create the documentary called “Who Killed the Electric Car?” My contribution may have been tiny, but being involved with the protest changed me into an activist for electric vehicles.
From my communications with one of the members of the protests and owner of the coordinating website, Doug Korthof, I learned about a place I could continue to publish my arguments for electric vehicles. That website was called EVWorld.com where the proprietor, Bill Moore had opened up a portion of the site to commentators like me. I engaged Bill Moore to allow me to post there and he let me. Suddenly, I was reaching tens of thousands of readers. I was engaging them in the comment section, and I went from being a mere commentator to something called a “blogger,” which came with some serious street creds among the EV enthusiast community. Later I learned from Bill Moore that Elon Musk had told him he had been an avid visitor to EVWorld.com even prior to his getting involved with Tesla. I’m sure that something Elon Musk read on EVWorld.com made him realize that EVs were something that could find a market in the United States. I hope it was something I wrote.
For people like me who remember very clearly how EVs have been suppressed. We remember how they were even rounded up and crushed by the likes of GM, Honda and the other internal combustion engine making car companies. And when we remember back in particular to the time just after when the vehicles were being crushed that out of that despair a company called Tesla dared to counter the narrative that there was no demand for EVs and entered into the market with an EV. Not only did Tesla enter the automobile market with an EV, but it did so successfully.
How successful is Tesla compared to the legacy car companies you ask? Tesla is so successful that last year it sold nearly a million vehicles, all of them EVs. This was around 37 times the number of EVs that GM sold last year. This is why everyone of us who are EV enthusiasts, not necessarily Elon Musk fanboys, but true EV enthusiasts are wondering why there is so much emphasis on GM and Ford and so much shunning of an unmitigated American EV success story as are Tesla and Elon Musk.
Right now GM doesn't have an EV that it is selling in any sort of volume. GM sold 26 EVs in the fourth quarter of 2021. The reason why is that its very limited EV product line began to catch fire on a regular basis and production was stopped in August. Tesla, on the other hand, managed to sell 308,600 EVs in the fourth quarter of 2021. If GM wouldn't have had the problems with the fires and production stoppage my best guess would be that GM would have sold around 9,000 EVs in that quarter. So, in comparison GM would have seen sales that were 34 times less than what Tesla was able to achieve even if things had been hunky-dory for GM. GM isn't a leader in EVs or anything approaching it, while Tesla isn't just the EV leader here at home in the US, but globally.
What there was prior to Tesla from the legacy automakers was a tremendous effort to destroy attempts to bring electric vehicles to market. These counter productive efforts on the part of GM continued all the way up to the very near present with the latest being that GM finally agreed just three weeks ago on January 9th of this year, to recognize California’s authority to set vehicle emission standards under the Clean Air Act. GM was working hard to disallow California from having different pollution regulations than those issued by the Federal Government even though California has had air quality regulations that predated those of the Federal Government's.
For me seeing the crushed EV1s and the electric S-10 pickups on the GM proving grounds had a profound affect on how I viewed GM. I was willing, however, to forgive and forget everything if GM were willing to change its attitude towards EVs and electrifying its cars. My mind was changed significantly when GM chose to produce the Chevy Volt, so much so that I leased one. The Chevy Volt was a fantastic vehicle. It is electrified, but it is not a true EV. It is a range extended short range EV. GM calls it an EREV. It starts out as an EV for its first 38 miles or so miles and then switches to gasoline after. For me it could have been an EV, since I only used its under 40 mile EV range for an entire year, and only used its gasoline range because I drove it to Wisconsin to show it off to my in-laws. With the Volt, and the all electric reasonably priced 238 mile range EV the Chevy Bolt, Bolt with a B, for me, all was forgiven. GM looked to me that it was finally doing something useful in this space. Then GM seemed to me to fall backwards into its old horrible culture. Instead of keeping the Volt and the Bolt, two vehicles that serve different markets, one for those just learning about electrified vehicles, the Volt plug-in hybrid, and those who wanted to jump into EVs with both feet, the Bolt battery electric vehicle, they decided to kill the Volt. Their argument was that by killing the Volt, sales of the Bolt would increase. For me, with my MBA, I knew that this wasn't going to happen since the vehicles served two distinct markets. And what happened was that sales of the Volt went to nil while sales of the Bolt didn't go up, at least not with any significance. GM continues to have the same problems it has had for years. Their problems are it has visionless management that don't seem to have the rudiments of understanding their own markets. They have bad corporate culture that stifles there often internal excellence. The Volt was a magnificent product that was ended by its leadership’s corporate stupidity.
On the other hand, Elon Musk's vision of what EVs could be has completely shaped the entire landscape of the future of automobiles. His understanding of what battery ranges should be — 200 miles plus, to how quick EVs should charge — under 30 minutes, to how publicly available charging locations should be distributed, to safety, to acceleration, etc. etc. the rest of automobilia has had to play catch up to Elon Musk’s vision for Tesla. Tesla and Elon Musk have been an unmitigated American EV and business success story. He and his company deserves to be at the forefront of what the Federal Government does in the EV space. Shunning them is a terrible mistake both economically, as well as, politically since there are a lot of Tesla fans out there, even if they are not died in the wool fanboys.