Free Republic

CARB and Tesla Motors have fooled us all. Tesla will keep selling cars as usual but, quietly, they will be earning 9 ZEV credits for each of them rather than the 4 they legally deserve - on the basis of a few thousand battery swaps that never actually took place. By the time everybody realizes what has happened, it will be too late.

So here we are, fifteen months after Tesla started getting carbon credits for the battery swap. The company has already cashed out, probably for more than $60 million. Without building a single swap station, or demonstrating the feature in consumer cars, or bothering to provide any sort of explanation. I have emailed them, written on their Facebook page, posted in their forum. Their only “reaction” was to kinda make the battery swap disappear from their website. It’s impossible to get an actual response from the company. Tesla intends to shut up its way out of this mess. The question is,...

The maximum amount of credits goes to a car that can go 300 miles and refuel to 95% of capacity within 15 minutes. The Tesla Model S falls short on range and, especially, on refuelling time. .... And so the joke begins. At the end of 2012, Californai decided that they needed a way to account for the Model S' ability to do a 90-second battery swap. This effectively meant it was refuelling a lot faster than its 15 minutes target, and to 100% capacity to boot. So the cancelled version remained at 4 credits, but the short-range version was...