The rap against Tesla has always been of the 'yes, but' variety. Yes, it's a fine artisanal designer and manufacturer of electric cars, and its CEO is one of the few business leaders alive for whom the label 'visionary' isn't hyperbolic.
Adam Lashinsky
Yes, my grandfather worked with Thomas Edison on the electric car, and he sold electric cars at the 1900 World's Fair in Paris.
Al Jardine
Electric cars aren't pollution-free; they have to get their energy from somewhere.
Alexandra Paul
I don't think the disruptor and the business model of a disruptor necessarily is an indication of the topography of the future. If it did, you would say then that everyone will make high-end electric cars, when the answer is clearly no.
Anand Mahindra
The time is right for electric cars - in fact the time is critical.
Carlos Ghosn
Electric cars are not going to take the market by storm, but it's going to be a gradual improvement.
Electric cars are going to be very important for urban transportation.
Cars have a large engine in the front and you have a gearbox, which is cumbersome. Electric cars don't have this problem. The motor is much smaller, the battery is below you. This will allow you to play with different shapes.
Porsche is the last bastion of cars for petrolheads. So when they start making electric cars, you realise the world really is changing.
Chris Harris
People say they are inventing electric cars. Well, where is the electricity coming from? Flowers? Maybe someday. But what is available now is oil and gas.
Christophe de Margerie
Electric cars are really very cool. Air-source heat pumps are great.
David J. C. MacKay
I really do encourage other manufacturers to bring electric cars to market. It's a good thing, and they need to bring it to market and keep iterating and improving and make better and better electric cars, and that's what going to result in humanity achieving a sustainable transport future. I wish it was growing faster than it is.
Elon Musk
I think there are more politicians in favor of electric cars than against. There are still some that are against, and I think the reasoning for that varies depending on the person, but in some cases, they just don't believe in climate change - they think oil will last forever.
It is definitely true that the fundamental enabling technology for electric cars is lithium-ion as a cell chemistry technology. In the absence of that, I don't think it's possible to make an electric car that is competitive with a gasoline car.
We have to use cars much more efficiently. We have to look at alternative technologies of cars such as biofuels or, even more importantly, electric cars.
Fatih Birol
We still see that people don't really realize that electric cars are here right now. And when we show up with an actual vehicle, and you see it drive away under its own power, it's still kind of a jaw-dropping moment for a lot of people.
Franz von Holzhausen
Every day I get to 'Think' and work on everything from digitizing electric grids so they can accommodate renewable energy and enable mass adoption of electric cars, helping major cities reduce congestion and pollution, to developing new micro-finance programs that help tiny businesses get started in markets such as Brazil, India, Africa.
Ginni Rometty
The car industry has invested a lot in hybrid, but my opinion is electric cars will take over a lot of hybrids quicker than people think now.
Henrik Fisker
We still haven't seen any cars take advantage of the electric powertrain in terms of how you proportion an electric vehicle versus traditional vehicles. Yes there's electric cars, but they haven't really done it in a beautiful way.
I think electricity will create a new world. I feel like the world will change a lot with electricity, and I wonder how it will change, it's scary, and it's going to be fun. I think there are so many things to think about when it comes to electric cars.
J-Hope
How we fund transportation in this country is broken. You all pay a gasoline tax, right? Well, cars go farther, we get electric cars, and so on. And then we do more with the money than just build roads. We do bike lanes and mass transit.
Of course we want to pocket Fisker. But we will bid rationally. Whatever the result, nothing can stop us from making electric cars.
As long as Wanxiang exists, we will pursue our dream to make electric cars, whatever the obstacles.
I don't believe in the electric cars, but I strongly believe in hybrids.
Eric Schmidt looks innocent enough, with his watercolor blue eyes and his tiny office full of toys and his Google campus stocked with volleyball courts and unlocked bikes and wheat-grass shots and cereal dispensers and Haribo Gummi Bears and heated toilet seats and herb gardens and parking lots with cords hanging to plug in electric cars.
The electric car, it's not the government saying, 'Oh, we must have electric cars.' The market was ready for that. People were ready for that, so, we have electric cars.
From solar to electric cars, from geothermal to reconfiguring the grid, the scale of investment needed in green technologies in order to meet whatever agreements on emissions reductions are finally agreed will be immense.
We have teams of people working on electric cars. So you never know - you may find Virgin competing with the Tesla in the car business as we do in the space business.
I think that if you don't do the full analysis of what the origin of the electrical power is, where it comes from, how you get batteries into these cars, what the cost is in terms of CO2 and the environment, I think the analysis that we are going to save the planet with electric cars is nonsense.
It's worth noting that everything - from the Internet to electric cars, genomic sequencing, mobile apps, and social media - were pioneered by startups, not existing companies.
Electric cars are coal-powered cars. Their carbon emissions can be worse than gasoline-powered cars.
