It's advertising, literally the only thing that matters is public perception. If Elon dickishness makes public perception toxic that's all that matters.
The number of pictures that are actually just ads upvoted to the front page was absolutely astonishing when I used reddit. I didn't understand how people could see a Coke can with a funny name on it and not realize that was an advertisement.
Taxing it is still pretty hard to do. It's often hard to know exact emissions or what to test. I agree its probably an easier solution, but the accounting of "who is actually producing the carbon" is incredibly complicated, and will become more incredibly complicated as soon as literally billions of dollars are at stake.
Thousands of other things also have carbon emissions: beef production for instance. Or deforestation -- while it doesn't have a positive CO2 benefit, it removes a CO2 sink. The fishing industry has massive CO2 costs that aren't from fossil fuels.
That's 1 thing (the meat industry) whose carbon emissions are both direct (not supply-chain based) and wouldn't be captured by a petroleum+coal producers tax. Not thousands.
Meat production is about 15% of our global carbon emissions, so certainly it can't be ignored - but when the other 85% is coming from activity fueled by petroleum+coal, it doesn't make a lot of sense to throw up your hands to reject a carbon tax because there's "thousands" of emissions source (which ones?) which collectively amount to less than a percentage point of our carbon footprint.
We mustn't let the best be the enemy of the very, very good. A straight-forward carbon tax on fossil fuels is both enforceable, linear, and not that complicated. Can we ignore ranching and meat production? Of course not. So let's tax both.
Third is the political problem. The international community has some tight limitations on who can refine Uranium. That's reasonable in a lot of ways as an effort to limit nuclear proliferation, but countries don't exactly like being put in the position that they can produce nuclear energy but only if 100% of their supply chain is outsourced to current Western powers.
For every purchase over a certain price this should probably be legally mandated. The same thing happened to a number of parents who had kids spend $1000s on the app store before they became more aggressive with deciding with how things can be purchased.
Nikola has focused on some substantially different segments of the EV market than they have. Nikola has focused on the trucking market, rather than the consumer car market, which at least is different from many of its competitors
Trucking you can still kill people. You know who I'd like to hear about? The company making self-loading and unloading shipping containers. Now that, I bet, is an achievable goal.
If you want some market crash hedges they are perfect.
Car companies are treated as government institutions. BMW and Volkswagen used to produce tanks. The German government will ask them too again if they start struggling to much. Companies like Fiat or Ferrari are as big a part of Italian national pride as rooting for their football team. Hyundai is 10% of South Korea's entire economy.
The car industry is political. Anyone assuming one company is going to sweep in and own everything hasn't paid attention. These companies will be defended until the ends of the earth by their own governments, so you have a massive put existing for all of them by default.
Sorry, apparently I interpreted "tanks" more literally than you do. The Kübelwagen and its amphibic Schwimmwagen variant were el cheapo jeeps, not tanks; BMW manufactured mainly aeroplane engines. Those "vehicles that they needed to wage war from the Urals to Morocco" mentioned in your third article were in all probability "staff cars", for superior officers, based on (barely modified?) pre-war standard civilian models.
So no tanks, AFAICT. They had enough other companies for that.
