Academics in Norway published a study last October arguing that EVs can be more polluting than is widely assumed.
The study highlighted the counterproductive promotion of EVs when the electric consumed is produced from oil and coal.
Sales of purely electric vehicles (EVs) will lag, however, obstructed by high prices and a woeful lack of charging stations.
The first, and most significant, is that its electric cars are capable of travelling 250 miles (400km) or more on a single charge, where other EVs manage between 75 and 110 miles at most.
That puts Tesla's electric vehicles more on a par with conventional petrol- or diesel-engined cars, and greatly reduces the "range anxiety" that plagues owners of other EVs.
Carmakers such as Audi, BMW, Cadillac, Mercedes and Porsche have introduced luxury EVs of their own that will go head-to-head with the Model S. But Tesla is more than a one-trick pony.
The company already provides a limited number to Mercedes and Toyota (both of which have minority stakes in Tesla) for a couple of their small EVs.
When these are assembled into battery packs, they could provide power sources for 500,000 EVs.
That is an awful lot, for J.D Power and Associates, a market research firm in California, expects EVs to make up less than 2% (ie, 1.3m) of all new cars bought around the world by 2020.
The new Volt is a step in the right direction but, as Toyota have recently concluded, we need some vast improvements in lithium-ion batteries to make EVs work reliably and safely.
The circle he has trouble squaring is the difference between a plant capable of producing 500,000 battery packs a year, and Tesla's likely output of less than a third that number of EVs.
