Whatever you think about Tesla cars, you could never deny Elon Musk’s company of a lack of ambition. Here’s a car maker that has only been in business for a few years, building vehicles that many consider niche, and yet is currently valued more than Ford.

This is all the more amazing when you realise that Tesla has not made so much as one dollar’s worth of profit. In fact, it has made substantial losses despite selling more than 50,000 of its high cost electric cars in 2016.

Much of the reason for this industry-defying valuation is that the stock market reckons Tesla is a company very much in its ascendency. A good deal of that thinking is based on the launch of a third model, conveniently called Model 3.

Whereas Teslas to date have been expensive executive-rivalling machines for those early adopters and brand devotees, the Model 3 is a much more decisive addition. It’s set to be priced at less than £30,000 so it tackles the likes of the Nissan Leaf and BMW i3 head-on.

Is the infrastructure in place to match Musk’s ambitions?

More importantly, this brings Tesla’s take on the EV slap-bang into the heart of territory presently occupied by the likes of the Audi A3, BMW 1 Series and Mercedes A-Class, as well as the pricier Volkswagen Golfs that so many of us love.

A practical EV with the lure of the Tesla badge and a battery range that means 300 miles between recharges is realistic makes the Model 3 a far more tempting proposition than any of its electric rivals. This is why the stock market is getting in a tizzy about Tesla.

As such, the Model 3 is definitely the breakthrough model in Tesla’s line-up. It’s the one that is set to take it from a small but interesting car maker into a global player, with Tesla theorising it will see annual production soar to 500,000 by the end of the decade.

Read more: Contract Hire & Leasing

Swedish study calls for smaller EV batteries, finds Tesla more polluting than an 8-year-old car

Swedish researchers have argued that electric vehicle (EV) batteries should not be as large as possible, but as large as necessary. This is the conclusion of their study which found that in terms of equivalent CO2 emissions, a car with an internal combustion engine (ICE) can drive for eight years before it reaches the same environmental load as a Tesla with a 100kWh battery.

Published in the journal Ingeniøren, the Swedish meta-study, which analyses and summarises studies completed so far in the field, found that around 150 to 200kg of CO2 equivalents (environmental impact equivalent to that of the release of CO2) are produced for every kilowatt hour (kWh) storage capacity of electric car batteries.

For example, taking two electric cars, the Tesla Model S and Nissan Leaf, which have 100kWh and 30kWh batteries respectively in Denmark, the study says these capacities are equivalent to 17.5 tonnes and 5.3 tonnes of CO2 being generated respectively.

To put this in perspective, a round-trip from Stockholm to New York, by International Civil Aviation Organisation figures, releases around 600kg (0.6 tonnes) of CO2 into the atmosphere. In Germany, annual emissions of CO2 are currently almost 10 tonnes per person.

Therefore, the study has calculated that a fossil fuel vehicle can currently drive for more than eight years before it reaches the same environmental impact of a Tesla. For the Nissan Leaf, with its smaller capacity battery, this figure comes in at three years.

Mia Romare, one of the two researchers of the study, hence concludes:

‘Unnecessarily large batteries weigh more on the environment. One should therefore consider whether one can manage with smaller batteries.’

According to the study, only 10-20% of the environmental impact is generated by the source extraction of raw materials such as lithium from the mines. The main environmental impact comes from the processing of these raw materials and the production of the lithium-ion batteries in factories, which accounts for around 80% of the environmental impact.

Read more: Autovista Group