Britain intends to ban the purchase of internal combustion and diesel engine cars in 2040, hoping to make everyone switch to electric cars. California, China and France all have similar schemes in place. These government decisions naturally provide yet another implicit subsidy to Tesla Motors (Nasdaq:TSLA) whose first quarter’s production of its latest “mass market” model totaled a magnificent 260 machines. For those of us needing reliable transportation for work or shopping, it may be time to invest in a horse.

Whatever the future of electric cars, one thing we can be sure of: Tesla (Nasdaq:TSLA) will not be in business by 2040. Instead, the manufacturers of electric cars in 2040 will be very much the same names you see today in the petrol automobile market, maybe with a couple of Chinese outfits thrown in. Now that General Motors is planning a line-up of 20 new electric models by 2023, the future belongs to companies that actually have the capability to manufacture and sell automobiles, as distinct from gigantic subsidy-driven vanity projects.

Tesla has from the beginning been a creature of government subsidy and leisure class vanity, making the kind of automobiles that Thorsten Veblen might have designed as a moral example. Having proved itself incapable of scaling up production effectively or of controlling costs, Elon Musk’s dream now faces a bleak future in which the White House is controlled by its political opponents for at least four years, causing the subsidy spigot, essential to the company’s survival, to drip at the best rather than gush.

Add the likelihood of a substantial recession within the next 18-24 months, and the entry into the electric automobile market of a myriad of huge, well financed, manufacturing-savvy competitors, and Tesla’s fate is inevitable. For us free-marketers, one is reminded of Oscar Wilde’s line on Dickens’ maudlin over-sentimentalized “Death of Little Nell:” A man will need a heart of stone not to laugh at the bankruptcy of Tesla Motors.