They contributed it it, and likely sped it up, sure. But government regulations were/are much bigger driver of it.

If you're going to take credit from Tesla here on this front and give it to the government, then it's only fair to also mention that government regulations were/are a big driver of fossil fuel subsidies and c02 emissions which is creating a problem.

Personally I don't find this to be super constructive. It's similar in some ways to taking credit away from the founder of a company and saying that a VC firm was a much bigger driver of the company's success.

I agree but in Norway, most of the government incentives for electric cars were in place 10 to 20 years before the car manufacturers started to sell good electric cars.

Hard to justify developing totally new types of cars for a country with just 5 million people living it.

True. Many countries had incentives before the industry reacted to the Tesla model s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_incentives_for_pl...

There's no evidence of that. I could just as easily make the claim that without Tesla we'd have had those cars sooner.