• by Thom Forbes , July 10, 2017

Elon Musk became the proud owner of the first of Elon Musk’s Tesla Model 3 vehicles to roll off the production line this weekend and he, of course, took to Twitter to crow about it in an understated way: two pictures and the simple words “First Production Model 3.”

“The images bear a strong resemblance to the car Musk first revealed in 2016. Although Musk said the first car would have gone to Ira Ehrenpreis, a venture capitalist who founded DBL Partners, Ehrenpreis ‘gave those rights to me as a 46th birthday present,’ Musk said on Twitter,” Brian Fung reports for the Washington Post, solving the nagging problem of what to get for the gent who seems to have everything — including a knack for generating ink and bytes.

“The one-man marketing machine, who also took on a large, high-profile battery project in Australia and a runs a privateer space company Space X, shared a couple of photos of the Model 3,” writes Samuel Gibbs for The Guardian. 

Expectations run even higher than the steep climb the Model 3 — also captured here in a rogue YouTube video — faces, it seems.

“Musk hopes that the Model 3 will be Tesla’s first mass-market vehicle, which will put strain on its current support system and dealerships, of which there are few compared to mainstream rivals such as General Motors, which built more than 10 million cars in the same time Tesla produced just 84,000 in 2015,” Gibbs continues.

The Model 3 “will cost $35,000 and can travel 215 miles on a single electric charge. A $7,500 federal tax credit for electric vehicles would lower the cost to $27,500, reports the AP’s Christopher S. Rugaber in USA Today, but was a welcome sight after a bad week on Wall Street. 

“Shares fell roughly 14% after Musk tweeted that deliveries of the company’s other two models — the Model S sedan and Model X SUV — were at the low-end of the company’s projections in the first half of this year. Musk also said the company would make 20,000 Model 3s in December, below previous estimates,” Rugaber writes.

Meanwhile, not a single new Tesla was registered in Hong Kong in April after authorities there ended a tax break, the Wall Street Journalreports.

 “In March, shortly after the tax change was announced and ahead of the April 1 deadline, 2,939 Tesla vehicles were registered there — almost twice as many as in the last six months of 2016,” write Tim Higgins and Charles Rollet. “The end of the tax exemption ‘has really put the brakes on electric-vehicle adoption in Hong Kong,’” Mark Webb-Johnson, a founder of Charged Hong Kong, a group that promotes electric vehicles, tells the reporters. No wonder: the price of basic Model S went to $130,000 from less than $75,000 in the stroke of a second at midnight April 1.

Indeed, electric cars make up about 1% of sales in the U.S., Europe and China, Spencer Jakab tells us in the Wall Street Journal. But even with Volvo saying it will ditch the internal combustion engine by 2019 and France wanting to ban fossil-fueled vehicles by 2040, their “success hinges largely on bringing down battery costs and extending range.”

That could very well happen, others point out.

“The conventional view holds that electric cars will remain a niche product for many years, plagued by high sticker prices and heavily dependent on government subsidies,” writes Brad Plumer for the New York Times. “But a growing number of analysts now argue that this pessimism is becoming outdated.”

Plumer cites a report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance that finds the price of plug-in cars “falling much faster than expected, spurred by cheaper batteries and aggressive policies promoting zero-emission vehicles in China and Europe.”

But Musk’s Tesla — and other clean-energy concerns — are also facing a subsidy backlash on the (solar) home front.

Solar panel installations, which grew as much as 900% over the last six years, have “come to a shuddering stop this year, with a projected decline in new installations of 2%, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Hiroko Tabuchi reports for the New York Times. Reasons include saturation in some markets and the financial woes of some manufacturers.

“But the decline has also coincided with a concerted and well-funded lobbying campaign by traditional utilities, which have been working in state capitals across the country to reverse incentives for homeowners to install solar panels,” Tabuchi writes. Their everyman argument is that allowing solar customers to sell power back to the grid at the retail price is unfair to homeowners who can’t, or don’t, instill solar themselves.

More to the point, we suspect, is that clean energy is hazardous to the bottom lines of investor-owned electric companies and their traditional fossil-fuel suppliers.