Musk also said that car companies should go electric, or die. “All car companies will go electric eventually,” he said. “Any car company that doesn’t go electric will be out of business.”
Speaking specifically about the VW scandal, Musk commented: “With hydrocarbon combustion we’ve hit the limits of physics – improvements are very tiny. There must have been lots of VW engineers under pressure – they’ve run into a physical wall of what might be possible so trickery was the only option.”
Commenting on emissions testing, Musk said that he thought emissions testing needed to be more realistic and more rigorous and that it should include testing cars over a longer period. “Cars are best when they’re new,” he said. “There’s massive degradation over time.”