Earlier this year snakes of people camped outside Tesla stores to place orders for the Model 3 electric car, handing over $1,000 deposits even though they had not seen the vehicle’s full design or specification.
The company, the biggest carmaker never to use an internal combustion engine, has achieved a market value of $33bn when producing just 50,000 cars a year — compared with a valuation of $47bn for General Motors, which last year made more than 6m cars.
Yet despite Tesla’s sales success, take-up of electric vehicles among consumers remains tiny. Fully electric cars (those without a combustion engine) account for less than 1 per cent of new car sales in the UK — which only rises fractionally when hybrids are included.