Tesla claims its owners saved ~2.5 million tons of CO2 – releases new map of its fleet’s impact

With the update to its referral program yesterday, Tesla also released a new real-time map of its global fleet impact on carbon emissions based on owner referrals and claims that its fleet saved almost 2.5 million tons of CO2 to date.

At the same time last year, Tesla claimed that it was at 1,3 million tons of CO2 emissions saved from being emitted at the tailpipe.

I couldn’t find the methodology behind the calculation and I asked Tesla to clarify (we will update if we get an answer) because it can obviously be a complicated calculation depending on how you look at it.

The most simple way is basing it solely on tailpipe emissions, which Tesla’s vehicles don’t emit, and calculating the average emission of cars in the Tesla Model S and Model X segments.

Of course, that doesn’t account for emissions from the electricity generation and therefore, regions using renewable energy to generate electricity would be more accurately represented in the map than coal-powered regions.

Nonetheless, the map gives an interesting look at the distribution of Tesla’s fleet around the world. Here’s the map for the whole world and just the US:

The US is definitely leading the world Tesla fleet with China in second place, but with only a fraction of the carbon impact.

Here are the top 10 countries and top 10 US cities:

No big surprises on both counts here aside maybe Hong Kong being slightly ahead of Norway, but that’s sure to change in the coming months or even weeks as Tesla’s sales in Hong Kong have virtually stopped this year since the government reduced EV incentives, while Tesla is still beating delivery records in Norway.

Hong Kong’s lead likely has something to do with a local Tesla Model S owner accumulating a record 188 referrals during the first round of the program back in 2015.

We can also access other markets by changing the location on Tesla’s website. Here’s Canada:

Here there are a few surprises. The biggest being my local market of Trois-Rivières, which reaches the 7th position despite being only the 27th largest city in Canada by population.

It has the same impact as Calgary, which is 10 times bigger and has its own Tesla store and service center. The closest Tesla location from Trois-Rivières is in Montreal.

Sylvain Juteau, the owner of Roulez Electrique in Trois-Rivières, probably has something to do with it since he dominated previous rounds of Tesla’s referral program and he himself accumulated a lot of mileage in his Tesla vehicles.

Check out the leaderboards in your own market and let us know in the comment section below if you find anything interesting.