HONG KONG: Tesla sales screeched to a halt in the last nine months of 2017 in Hong Kong, dubbed a “beacon city” by founder Elon Musk, after the government slashed a tax waiver for electric vehicles.
Touted as the city with the highest number of Teslas per capita by Mr Musk in early 2016, just 32 of the company’s vehicles were registered in Hong Kong between April and December, figures from the Transport Department showed. That is down from nearly 2,000 in the same period in 2016. Generous tax breaks had buoyed the sale of Teslas, which are ubiquitous on the streets of Hong Kong. Removal of that break almost doubles the sticker price of a Tesla Model S 75D to HK$1.03m ($132,337). The precipitous drop in sales for Tesla follows similar falls in other jurisdictions, such as Denmark, after the removal of tax breaks. Hong Kong ended the break under pressure from non-electric carmakers and citing overall growth in the number of private cars in the city. The move also exposes an inconvenient truth for Hong Kong: electricity generation is so dirty on the island that a Tesla car charged there will be responsible for one-fifth more CO2 over its average life than an equivalent petrol guzzler, according to research from Bernstein in 2016.
