6 Min Read Much has been made of the historic rise in valuation of electric vehicle companies like Tesla and BYD, which are disrupting the auto sector, and Reuters has taken note of the recent pull back in some of these stratospheric valuations. Slideshow ( 4 images ) What may be lying beneath the surface of this still impressive performance from the disruptors is that the old implicit rule for business – the alleged trade off between profitability and the environmental responsibility – is less true today than in the history of the auto sector. In the last decade, success in the auto sector was based less on improving environmental impacts of the products they built (most all the impact is from product use), and more based on the need to satisfy consumers’ insatiable demand to go bigger – supersize me with an SUV (and let’s not focus on the carbon footprint):