The owner of a Tesla Model S has been fined £7,500 by the Singapore government, which deemed the car produced excessive emissions despite being fully electric.
Tesla buyer Joe Nguyen reportedly had spent months trying to import a Model S that he’d bought in Hong Kong, expecting to receive a government grant for buying an ultra-low emissions vehicle.
Instead, Singapore’s Land Transport Authority slapped him with the fine after ranking the all-electric saloon in the dirtiest, highest-polluting category of vehicles.
The first Tesla to be tested by Singapore’s transport authority, the government concluded that it consumes as much as 444 watt-hours of electricity per kilometre driven.
According to authorities, this is the equivalent of a conventionally-fuelled car which produces 222g/km of CO2, putting it on par with the likes of high-powered SUVs like the Range Rover SDV8.
'Upstream emissions'
Singapore’s government argues that even though the car itself produces no tailpipe emissions, electric cars are only as clean as the electricity grids that they charge their batteries from.
Known as ‘upstream emissions’, this has become a growing cause for concern amongst governments and climate change researchers alike.
However, Tesla claims that the most powerful Model S variant, the 90kWh P90D, uses around 210 watt-hours per kilometre, so it’s unclear how Singaporean authorities arrived at a figure twice that.
Tesla chief executive Elon Musk took to Twitter to confirm that the situation hasn’t gone unnoticed to the company, and said he had spoken to Singapore’s Prime Minister about it.
Musk is already in good standing with Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, who toured California’s Silicon Valley last month in a Tesla Model S P90D.
