Column: Elon Musk is an antisemite. What can anyone do about it?

You might not like Tesla, but this comment is a bit against reality. Their cars are consistently rated as 8/10 or 9/10. You don’t get there by terrible QC. Subjectively, the way they designed the interiors is brilliant, compared to other makers who just tried to make more of the same they were doing last year only with an electric motor

Rated...by...whom?

Have you not seen the long list of recalls, making Tesla the most recalled car brand in history? Sure a fair chunk of those are OTA sofware updates...but still there's a reason they got out first- cutting corners. most of those software updates are fixes for things that should have been found in testing.

also a quick google search will turn up a plethora of hits on quality control that just don't ordinarily happen at other carmakers. The kinds of things that would never hit the sales lot.

I think you're living in your own reality, a bit there.

Subjectively, the way they designed the interiors is brilliant, compared to other makers who just tried to make more of the same they were doing last year only with an electric motor.

Yeah it's so much better to open a door in a Tesla by pressing the handle into the car! I also love opening the door from the inside using a button to open it! It's important to redesign things that worked perfectly fine the old way for millennia just to keep people on their toes. /s

Rated by whom? The schmucks that drive them? Bought and paid for auto reviewers? Their opinion isn't worth dick to me. Have you seen how poorly the panels match up on these things? They look like bad highschool metal shop projects on the outside and prototypes on the inside.

Nevermind the pure smug coming out of the exhaust on these cars.

Yeah, I'm super sure that the thousands of tonnes of raw earth that has to be processed by enormous mining equipment, and then refined through absolutely filthy chemical processes to extract the lithium, cobalt and magnesium required for just a handful of battery cells represents a net good for the planet. Just peachy.

All good though, because all of the raw materials are then only shipped to the other side of the world on ships powered by literal sludge to be manufactured into by batteries by China with zero environmental regulation and all waste products flowing straight into the ocean, before shipping the manufactured cells back across the world on more sludge powered ships.

Eventually, these lean, green, zero emission machines end up zipping around pumping out smug before it goes home to get charged by a power grid that is still 60% fossil fuel based. So, instead of the combustion of fossil fuels occurring under your bonnet, it occurs at the coal fired power plant down the road allowing you to recharge your battery with all the inefficiencies that entails and convince yourself you are somehow saving the planet.

University of Liege researcher Damien Ernst said in 2019 that the typical EV would have to travel nearly 700,000 km before it emitted less CO2 than a comparable gasoline vehicle.

After he accepted a bunch of dirty cash from the auto industry, he later revised his figures down to about 15,000km. That's a fairly major revision and if it smells like bribery that's because it was.

If you genuinely want to reduce carbon emissions, kill yourself. It's the most effective way to save the planet.