Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, says the United States government should no longer be funding efforts to create electric cars.
In a tweet from the chief executive’s account on Thursday, Musk said that while there was a “big case for the government to lead on electric car technology”, the government should not be “suppressing Tesla while trying to get these EVs cheap”.
Musk also stated that the electric vehicle programme was “like the war on drugs,” tweeting that only the cartels were not being prosecuted.
Tesla’s shares have slumped by 25% since April, largely due to concerns about production and sales for its Model 3 sedan, as well as rumours that Musk was plotting to sell the company.
“I’m working on getting more car owners to partner with us instead of using third parties,” Musk added.
This could refer to the company’s Connected Services division, which allows Model 3 owners to organise charging and insurance services for their vehicles.
On Tuesday, the company announced that Tesla had created its first Roadster, an electric vehicle vehicle car built in a clean-sheet design from scratch, which will go into production in 2020.
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Earlier in June, the company revealed a data vault for Model 3 drivers that was effectively like an AWS instance.
It’s been said that the data vault is a replacement for a Tesla service engineer who checks that the driver’s car has been driving throughout the day and that it’s charging properly.
As many as 1,300 of Tesla’s dealership network staff will begin getting trained on how to set up the cloud service, in preparation for the launch in 2020.