During the recent Tesla Cyber Rodeo — aka annual stockholder meeting — Elon Musk suggested that Tesla might build 10 to 12 new factories in the coming years. When a member of the audience shouted out “Canada!” Musk said, “I’m half Canadian. Maybe I should.”

The European Union is in favor of banning the sale of cars with infernal combustion engines by 2035, but Germany has been reluctant to join in that commitment. Automobile manufacturing is big business in Germany, what with Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, BMW, and Mercedes Benz, plus Tier One suppliers like Bosch, Siemens, and Continental accounting for hundreds of thousands of jobs directly related to automobile production.

An editorial writer and columnist for the Washington Post wrote a screed attacking electric cars this week. His heavily slanted piece was filled with misinformation. Here’s the truth about driving an electric car in winter.

The more electric cars come to market, the more the people who stand to be the biggest losers from the EV revolution (that would be the oil companies) are ramping up their attacks on them. The latest tactic is to claim the emissions associated with mining the materials needed to make EV batteries are so huge that any claim about them being environmentally friendly is false.

While we understand intuitively that electric vehicles should be less expensive to maintain, now there’s proof. The US government operates the largest vehicle fleet in the world, so it stands to reason it should know a thing or two about how much it costs to keep them all running.

In summary, the EV revolution will net the US economy 2 million new jobs and allow the nation to reap direct and indirect savings of $4 trillion in the next 30 years.

Unlike General Motors, which withdrew from the European market when it sold its Opel division to PSA Group, Ford continues to do business on the Continent and is looking to the future. Last July, Ford and Volkswagen concluded an agreement that allows Ford to utilize VW’s MEB electric car chassis as the basis of its own electric cars. That chassis is already being used to build the ID.3 and ID.4 cars in Zwickau and will be the starting point for the ID. Buzz that will go into production in Hannover in 2022.

He indicated the company has spoken to a number of car makers about using its EV platform but declined to name the companies involved. There may be a hint in other electric car news from last week. Last January, FCA named Foxconn as a joint-venture partner to build EVs in China.

Not being about Tesla, these latest fires from non-Tesla EVs have caused less of a media frenzy. Still, those who of us who wish for a faster transition to all electric transportation understand that people who are on the fence about driving an electric car don’t need any excuse to delay their decision to buy one.

Data is king, and when it comes to information on the frequency of repairs on automobiles, Consumer Reports has more data than anyone. For its latest report, it did a deep dive into the data from its 2019 and 2020 reliability surveys of electric and gasoline powered vehicles. After crunching all the numbers, Consumer Reports says “drivers of electric vehicles are saving an average of 50% on maintenance and repair over the life of a vehicle compared to owners of gas-powered vehicles.”

Greenpeace and Transport & Environment have conducted a study of how owners of plug-in hybrid cars use them in real world driving and come to a startling conclusion — plug-in hybrids are no damn good at lowering emissions if drivers don’t plug them in.