THE Tesla model 3 appears to be Nicola Sturgeon's and her ministers luxury electric car of choice, according to new data published.
Figures, which were published yesterday, revealed that the Scottish Government has a fleet of 28 ministerial vehicles which are used for official business.
These include 10 Tesla model 3s - priced at upwards of £42,500 - registered in either 2021 or 2020 with 11 slightly older Kia Optima PHEV also in the fleet. The remaining seven cars include an electric model of Volvo.
Tesla is owned by the US-based billionaire entrepreneur and founder of aerospace company SpaceX Elon Musk and has been a prominent critic of Russian President Vladmir Putin.
Mr Musk, the world's richest man, on Monday challenged Putin to a fight.
He took to Twitter to see whether the Russian leader would test his mettle in person rather than through his country's forces.
"I hereby challenge Vladimir Putin to single combat. Stakes are Ukraine," said Mr Musk.
"Do you accept this fight?" he added in Russian, directly addressing the official English-language Twitter account of the 69-year-old president.
When one of Musk's 77 million followers wrote that the Tesla founder might not have thought his challenge through, Musk said he was "absolutely serious."
"If Putin could so easily humiliate the west, then he would accept the challenge. But he will not," he added.
The South African-born Musk, 50, had already offered his support for Kyiv, tweeting "Hold strong Ukraine" this month while also offering "my sympathies to the great people of Russia, who do not want this" war.
He also responded last month to a Kyiv plea by activating his Starlink internet service in Ukraine and sending equipment to help bring connectivity to areas hit by Russian military attacks.
The Scottish Government published details on its car fleet after a freedom of information request.
It said that all "Government Car Service (GCS) vehicles" are compliant with low emission requirements, as set out in The Low Emission Zones (Scotland) Regulations 2021.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel