Consumer Reports calls latest Tesla best vehicle they've ever tested, right wing goes nuts

[DirkGently]

40. Respectfully, I still think anti-EV grumping is mostly contrarian silliness.

To me the appeal of the emergence of EVs is that it's an efficient technology with a lot going for it and and the potential to be hugely useful. And as a car enthusiast, I find instant torque and quiet operation and fueling at home desirable.

Electric vehicles are cool, period. And the bottom line is that they do have the potential to be extremely environmentally beneficial, probably more so than any other current technology.

So someone "reminding" us all that EVs aren't magic energy-free perpetual motion machines doesn't seem that helpful. It assumes that people who like EVs think that, and I don't think they do.

And as far as that goes, electric motors are more than twice as efficient as internal combustion, they don't emit directly, and they can be powered by renewables. That's more than enough to make them a good idea, and all current information points to an easy net benefit in using EVs as far as energy consumption and pollution are concerned.

And respectfully, a lot of this, "But electricity still comes from fossil fuels for now" feels like bad-faith nonsense from people either automatically opposed to anything that smacks of green technology, which they seem to fear will be forced on them, or from pedants who revel in "debunking" potential radical advances of any kind.

And lest you think I'm making that up, I've read Car and Driver for years, and I distinctly remember Brock Yates and the other dirt-track era gear heads there whining that electrics were boring and slow and were being pushed by hair-shirt environmentalists out to spoil everyone's good time.

When the Tesla Roadster smashed the magazine's long-standing top gear 50-70mph acceleration stat -- a great measure of useable real world performance -- Car and Driver admitted it was amazed, but felt compelled to whine, "We still wouldn't want one."

And remember Jeremy Clarkson on Top Gear, who ran down a Tesla's battery deliberately, and then claimed it crapped out on the track, dramatically pushing it back to the paddock? When Tesla sued, the show said it was just entertainment, and it was entitled to dramatize what a real battery failure would've looked like, if it had actually happened. Because Clarkson, a British libertarian whose sense of humor includes things like racist comments and punching a co-worker for not getting his dinner, has a childish hatred of electric vehicles.

And so on.

I think it's fine, if you stumble on someone confused about why they like electric vehicles to point out that they're not a compromise-free instant solution to the world's energy and pollution problems. Nothing is, so that's pretty hard to contradict. I'm just not sure there's a problem with people thinking that.