Per Wikipedia...

"Global sales totaled over 400,000 Leafs by March 2019"

That is awesome and the Leaf is a fantastic vehicle only limited by its range. But it does not sound like one million Nissan Leafs have been produced. And the Tesla milestone still carries extra significant because all of its models are reasonable replacements for ICEs in most households. The Leaf is suited to a much smaller set of use cases.

I can understand critiquing Tesla's business models, their claims about the cars, their financial status, or even Musk's character. But calling what Tesla has done over the last 10 years unimpressive makes no sense to me.

They produce great cars that people love, but people generally love high-end very expensive cars.

A Nissan Leaf is not as nice of a car as a Tesla Model 3 in pretty much any way, but it also costs 3/4 of the price. Meanwhile, the Leaf is profitable per-car, and the base model Tesla Model 3 is barely break-even per-car, even with the very aggressive accounting that Tesla uses. Tesla can't keep producing base Model 3's at the price they are selling them for (even at over $40k), they are a loss leader to look competitive on price, the profitable version is well over $50k without government subsidies that will end this year (and the performance model is over $60k). A leaf is around $30k.

What is your point?

This article claims Tesla is the first to have made 1 million electric vehicles.

Is this incorrect?

The way it is stated "No other automaker has achieved that kind of volume when it comes to producing long-range electric passenger cars." gives them some wiggle room in their claim. Still, it is a very impressive feat for an automobile startup.

Ah, I see, it’s the somewhat subjective claim long-range.

You Jamie for pointing that out.

That should have said "Thank you for pointing that out", but my new phone seems to like changing ordinary phrases in to nonsensical words.

You're getting a lot of flak but this was my reaction too. The mistake was comparing it to the leaf instead of all cars the company produced and confronting the futurist hype train head-on. This is 2020, a million cars isn't impressive. Fuel efficient hybrids have done more to help the climate than Tesla has. Just look at Europe, electric cars are so practical and efficient that countries are working to ban their competition.

Tesla basically created the electric car sector. Almost every major car company has or will have an electric out in order to compete.

Whoever invented lithium batteries created the electric car sector (In fact he won a Nobel prize for it, https://news.uchicago.edu/story/john-b-goodenough-shares-nob...). Everything else has existed since the 1800s (although it has been refined over time). There were even attempts at electric cars in the 1800s. In fact, almost 40% of all cars in 1900 were electric! If they had lithium batteries in 1890 we would have been driving electric cars for the last 130 years.

GM had a great electric car in the mid 90s that couldn't compete due to lead acid batteries being heavy and having poor energy density (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1). Put Lithium batteries in an EV1 and people still wouldn't have wanted it because oil prices were low, but it beat the Model S to market by nearly 20 years and again given a better battery technology like lithium would probably have led to a majority of cars being electric today.

Why do designers seem hellbent if making electric cars look strange.

The tide seems to have turned... a bit.

The main driver for car companies to produce electric cars is not competition with anyone, it's the new stricter fleet emissions standards in the world's two biggest car markets: China and Europe. Car companies will market and sell electric cars in China and Europe in preference to other regions for the time being because of this.

There's no urgency for Toyota to produce electric cars because they've been making hybrids for a long time and they're already in a good position with the new emissions standards.

None of that addresses my points. Electric cars haven't escaped being toys for rich people, if they had you wouldn't be seeing Europe and California talking about the need to protect electric cars via legislation. On the other front, increasingly efficient ICE engine designs have done far more to reduce emissions in the present.

This seems like a well reasoned argument.

Have improved emission standards done more to comeback air pollution that Telsa?

I’m no expert, but I’m willing to bet: yes.

Will has improved emission standards always out compete electric vehicles? I’m willing to bet: no.

Not sure why that matters.

We definitely want to improve ICE engines too.

With any new technology, the real trick is to produce a marketable product then keep iterating, with customers providing the revenue.

Big LCD TV’s, for example, used to cost over $10,000.

Now that Tesla has proven the product, we are now getting a battery arms race...

Anyway, this is all well known about how technology works... Apple I to iPhone...

Now where are consumer robots?

Nissan had a bit of a head start on Tesla.