On 17 March 2024, Austrian far-right activist Martin Zellner was scheduled to give a lecture in the Swiss canton of Aargau on ‘re-migration’ (repatriation of migrants to their home countries).

However, the cantonal police prevented Mr Zellner from holding his lecture on grounds of public safety and ordered him to leave the canton.

Tesla’s Elon Musk reacted immediately to this situation: on X (formerly Twitter), he retweeted Zellner’s post, “Is this legal? This is a form of siding with Mr Zellner, who is fuelling the division of society, and has led to a ‘firestorm’ of controversy.

Mr Mask also came under fire before the autumn 2023 parliamentary elections in Hesse, Germany, when he called for people to “vote for the anti-immigration AfD (Alternative for Germany)”. The Greens appealed to the European Commission to ‘stop masked election propaganda’, but the result was that the AfD outvoted the Greens and became the second party.

The Greens are pro-BEV and the AfD is anti-BEV eFuel; the owner of Tesla would be closer to the Greens in terms of policy, but Mask’s recent words and actions support the far right and the AfD. He may be a genuine populist who doesn’t care about policy and panders to the masses in a business sense.

On a quieter note, according to some statistics, BEVs seem to have a lower risk of ignition than engine vehicles. However, if a BEV is assumed to be involved in a fire, it is more difficult to determine the appropriate extinguishing method and fires tend to be more prolonged. In particular, it takes longer to extinguish fires in enclosed spaces such as vehicle carriers and covered parking lots, and in order to reduce the risk of fires in BEVs and to extinguish them quickly, relevant authorities in major countries have initiated measures.