For years Tesla refused to make public it's sales numbers, after going public it's reluctantly doing so. I have read from 2012 to 2014 it's sales numbers in tenth of thousands per year. In comparison Mercedes Benz sells its gas powered toys in hundreds of thousands per year.
I am not sure about Java, but in C, C++ function's stack's memory is not allocated on the heap and has much more limited space. So any elegant solution involving recursion is bound to hit memory limit pretty quickly and one has to watch out for the size of recursed data structure.
In my opinion, based on Tesla's maintenance cost today, it's a fancy toy for rich people.
It's out of reach of general consumer and when it comes to saving planet by consuming electricity, not gas in US I am skeptical. What I want to find out is a green house effect from 1 mile per gallon of gas vs. 1 mile per kWh off produced electricity. Considering US electricity is produced by coal burning plants, which are considered primary green gas effect contributors.