About a decade ago I had my first ride in an electric car. It was a “Leaf” by Nissan, an early mover in the Australian electric vehicle (EV) market, and its proud owner was Clive Attwater.
Attwater is now a director of Electric Highway, a Tasmanian company formed in 2017 by EV enthusiasts, which now has charging stations in 25 key locations around the state. Limited government support for EV rollout in Tasmania makes private initiatives like these all the more important.
Another key player in the multi-year effort to help car buyers go electric is the Tasmanian branch of the Australian Electric Vehicle Association (AEVA), which sends out monthly bulletins full of all you need to know if you’re a current or would-be EV user.
Every so often these newsletters go into detail about shiny new players in this burgeoning market, and for years just one brand dominated the news. This was Tesla, the US-based manufacturer famously led by technology entrepreneur Elon Musk.
Around the same time as I took that ride in the Leaf, I waxed lyrical in this column about that young man from South Africa who, having made a fortune from the sale of his company PayPal, was setting the EV world alight. I even likened Musk to a hero of mine, the late astronomer and public educator Carl Sagan.
I had no idea what really drives Musk and knew nothing of his early years in Africa. But now that he’s axing thousands of US government jobs as head of President Donald Trump’s “Department of Government Efficiency”, his past is getting a lot more attention.
Having put Musk in the category of climate champion, as a big investor in solar power and Tesla, I was shocked to see him at campaign rallies alongside the man famous for calling climate science “fake news” and urging the oil and gas industry to “drill, baby, drill”. But I shouldn’t have been.
Guardian journalist Chris McGreal and others have dug up some fascinating information about the man’s past. There’s not a smidgin of Sagan in him, but quite a lot of Trump and other such individuals with white supremacist leanings. Behind his well-known success story lies a family history deeply rooted in South Africa in the era of apartheid.
That story includes fellow-US entrepreneurs Peter Thiel and David Sacks, with whom Musk has a great deal in common. Like Musk, Thiel and Sacks grew up in South Africa. Their families amassed significant wealth in southern Africa’s colonial era, developing links with ultra-conservative politics there and in Europe and North America.
Musk, Sacks and Thiel emigrated to North America in the 1990s, joining with another South African expatriate, Roelof Botha, to form the finance management company PayPal. Like Musk, Thiel and Sacks invested heavily in right-wing politics, including J.D. Vance’s career before and during his rise to the vice-presidency.
Seen in that light, Musk’s switch from technological whiz-kid to fixer for a lawless president is not so puzzling. This clever, driven man enjoys seeing his ideas take physical form, but mitigating climate change was never his main game. In switching to Trump, the latter’s aversion to climate action didn’t matter. What did was the power Musk now enjoys over the “Deep State” he so despises.
To potential buyers of his vehicles that is now a problem – the main reason Tesla sales have tanked this year on top of a 16 per cent decline last year. In what is now a highly competitive market, Tesla’s current models can’t match the driver-assistance capability and battery power of top competitors from Asia and Europe. And the much-hyped Cybertruck is an expensive dud.
I sympathise with those climate-aware Tesla owners, including many Tasmanians, who bought in good faith. Musk’s role in tearing apart lawful, democratic government in the US has turned their cars into objects of distaste, even derision. In the US the Cybertruck has the nickname “Swasticar”.
There is a silver lining. Prospective EV buyers can now choose from 20 makers in Australia, many offering multiple models at prices well below Tesla’s level of a decade ago. Cheaper options in the form of second-hand Nissan Leaf EVs from Japan are still available through the Good Car Company, founded in Tasmania six years ago.
As for Tesla, the best outcome would be for the company and its leader to part company. That might prevent a perfectly decent brand name – in the late 1800s Nikola Tesla was a thinker and inventor of real note – from going to the wall along with the man who sided with autocracy over democracy.