How clean is the Tesla?

The common view is that electric cars are zero emissions and therefore significantly cleaner than the standard gasoline vehicles.

Recently an analyst called Nathan Weiss has claimed that the Tesla model S is actually a highly polluting vehicle.

His point is that to really understand how clean an electric car is, you can't really just look at the car but at the entire value chain that supports it.  So, we should compare the pollution from the production, distribution and operation of gasoline cars and its fuel and then compare it to the pollution from the and operation of electric cars and its fuel.

I am not really qualified to evaluate this.  However, fortunately there are others who have looked at this question. This article at www.popsci.com by David Nolan does an excellent job of analyzing Nathan Weiss' analysis.  

David Noland ultimately concludes that the carbon emissions for the Tesla model S is likely around 293 g/mi roughly comparable to the Scion and less than the ~312 g/mi for a Toyota Highlander.

The good news is that net net the Tesla, for the type of performance stats it has, is still very clean.  However, in terms of carbon footprint the zero emissions claim is misleading.  The current electric car technology is not materially better than the hybrid gasoline cars.  If you include Sulphur Dioxide, it's likely that the Tesla S would fail most emissions tests as coal powered electric plants are many orders of magnitude more polluting than cars.

As David Nolan points out, electric technologies are improving and over time, electric cars could be much cleaner.  Until that happens, it seems a good hybrid car may outperform an electric car.