Super Bowl ad takes a dig at Elon Musk, Volkswagen. Tesla chief's response

Electric vehicle start-up Polestar on Sunday took a jibe at Tesla chief Elon Musk as it made its debut in the much-sought-after Super Bowl advertisement space.

The 30-second ad shows several lines on the screen, directed at legacy automakers. “No epic voice overs, no punchlines, no dieselgate, no dirty secrets, no hidden agenda,” the ad goes on.

“No conquering Mars,” Polestar claims in the ad, in its obvious dig at Elon Musk who has often spoken about his dream of building cities on Mars.

The billionaire, who is also the founder of SpaceX, responded to the ad with a laughing emoji.

Polestar’s “no dieselgate” is aimed at Volkswagen. The scandal known as “Dieselgate" erupted in 2015 when the US Environmental Protection Agency found that Volkswagen had installed special software to rig US emissions tests for its latest “clean diesel” vehicles. The German car manufacturer admitted to fitting millions of cars with the device and it turned out that the use of the cheating software had not been isolated to the US. In Europe, it had argued that the software could be justified by the fact that it helps protect the engine over time.