It’s being hailed as simply extraordinary. Since introducing the Model 3 sedan — a far cheaper electric vehicle, aimed for broader consumption, than the Model S — Tesla Motors saw more than 300,000 orders in a week.
Tesla aims to sell 500,000 electric vehicles per year by 2020, an ambitious goal but one that, based on these numbers, doesn’t sound so unachievable.
Clearly, part of the appeal of the new vehicle is not just its sleekness or new range, but rather, its environmental promise and symbolism.
One key question, though, is what this surge in Tesla sales means for a critical parameter that will determine the planet’s future. By electrifying transportation (and, thus, powering cars not with gasoline derived from oil, but rather with an electricity supply that itself is getting greener), how fast can we start to bring down U.S. and global emissions?
Current transportation emissions, on a global scale, were 6.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents in 2010, or about 23 percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions related to the use of energy, according to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The number rises to 7 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalents when other greenhouse gases are included. The majority of that was for road-based transportation, though the figure also includes shipping, aircraft, rail and other sources. (In the United States, transportation makes up about 25 percent of emissions.)
Decarbonizing the transportation sector has long been regarded as a difficult endeavor because these are mobile rather than stationary sources of emissions, and because emissions from cars and other transportation sources are expected to grow so much in the future. Thus, the 7 billion tons in 2010 are projected to be 12 billion per year in 2050, barring major policy shifts.
Several experts last week said that booming Tesla sales don’t make enough of a dent in transportation — at least not immediately — to shift this in a substantial way.
The problem is that the global auto industry is massive, and even a half-million Tesla sales per year isn’t all that much in that context.
“Even if Tesla manages to scale up and hit its very aggressive target of 500,000 vehicles a year by 2020, that would still represent only about 0.5 percent of global light-duty vehicle sales,” said Colin McKerracher, head of advanced transport at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “So it’s hard to have an overall impact from them alone.”
However, if this marks a broader shift, in which Tesla ends up driving the rest of the auto industry to change and make more electric cars, that’s another matter.
“It’s obviously important for Tesla, but I think it’s going to push other automakers to match what Tesla’s doing, and also get other people to think about switching to electric,” said David Reichmuth, a senior engineer in the clean-vehicles program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Margo Oge, former director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality and author of the book “Driving the Future: Combating Climate Change with Cleaner, Smarter Cars,” concurred.
“What (Tesla’s success is) doing is bringing the cost down on the battery, making it affordable, putting pressure on other companies,” said Oge.
To see why it’s so hard to quickly move the needle in this arena, consider some numbers. Currently, light-duty vehicles sold around the world annually number 88.5 million in 2015, according to Navigant Research. And they’re expected to grow and grow and grow.
