Today, Andrew Tate decided to provoke environmental warrior Greta Thunberg on Twitter with a post about his fossil-fuel-burning cars. Out of his collection of 33 cars, he specifically calls out the thirsty Bugatti with a W16 8.0L quad-turbo which can consume as much as 41.9 L/100km in city driving.
He rounds out the tweet with the statement ‘Please provide your email so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions.’.
Tate’s Tweet has been seen by 99 Million people, however, Greta’s snapping response has been seen by a staggering 147 Million people (at the time of writing), an outsized view count, given her 5.1 Million followers. The two are not that different from each other when it comes to split opinions.
Greta opted for a very blunt, pretty funny response that clearly garnered a lot of support.
Love them or hate them, there’s no doubt they are attracting many eyeballs to their side of the climate change battle.
It seems Tate does have at least one EV in his collection, the fastest EV production car, the Rimac Nevera, clearly a choice for performance reasons, not because of its zero emissions. While Tate’s unlikely to be bothered by the response online today, he, like many other petrol heads, will need to come to terms with the fact that the future will be electric vehicles.
EVs have fewer parts and the parts they do have, require far less maintenance here’s the big one, they are starting to outperform combustion vehicles in virtually every category. Sure, there are some small, weird edge cases people scramble for as a reason the EV transition can’t happen, but that’s a denial of the overwhelming majority of use cases that will be far better served by the lower running costs and what will soon be a lower purchase price that ICE vehicles.
Once you have a price, range and charging infrastructure under control, consumers would really have to go out of their way to buy a combustion-powered vehicle and sure if money is no object like Mr Tate, you’ll have whatever your way, but the economics of the auto industry means that one by one, all brands will transition their vehicles to EVs, it’s simply a matter of time.
The key takeaway here is that regardless of your motivation, to help save the environment, or simply to get the fastest, cheapest vehicle with the best technology, you won’t have that choice in years to come.
Tate’s response to Greta’s tweet was a fairly lame one.
I love how this discussion is turning around. Thanks techAU, for the “shrug of the shoulder” response about the inevitable dominance of EV’s in the market place. And good on Greta, for her poise and wit.
Amazing all the things idiots bang on about today. Wete already in use when I was a kid. Electric buses, electric milk floats, still had horse and cart collecting recyclable scrap. Milk bottles werent plastic. Nappies weren’t throwaway they were Terry towelling. Everybody knew someone who had an allotment or a greenhouse, who used to give neighbours free veg. Shopping bags weren’t polythene. They’re were like a thick brown paper bag.
Now if Greta Thumberg would like to have a chat with me about recycling, I’d love to.
Funniest thing is the violent misogynist Tate being tracked down over the Internet and put under house arrest for sex trafficking as he attempted to taunt Thunberg. An incarcerated Tate will have greatly improved CO2 emissions and benefit the whole world!