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Comment by NomDePlum | Hacker News Reader

Where I am, the UK, it's definitely a topic of conversation, similarly Tesla's have been popular. However, the Tesla brand is increasingly being perceived as being toxic here. I'd attribute that entirely to Musk.

It will be interesting to see how it unfolds, particularly amongst current Tesla owners, as if that base shrinks the company could be in real trouble.

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Tesla parked near me has a bumper sticker to the effect of "I bought this before Elon went crazy, sorry"

He was crazy from the start though.

Yeah but now people think he's turned completely nazi. His nazi salute was probably not a nazi salute, but it doesn't matter. People's perception of him has flipped completely. He spent a lot of his remaining goodwill.

Please check out the 88 all over Tesla's docs and car attributes and prices, and reconsider.

Could be he just likes the number 88. It doesn't need to mean Heil Hitler just because you see it that way.

i definitely didn't say i did, my calculator is out of order

Just so you know, my downvote for this !@*(% comment is one of the few ways we Germans dare to be patriotic.

Could you elaborate? I'm German and reasonably patriotic, but I don't get why you'd want to down vote parent.

Edit: To elaborate: I can see that Elon is sometimes being put in a worse light than would be appropriate. Same is true for Trump. I cheekily think they kinda deserve it, but having run a company that was in the media a lot, you do get unfair coverage from the best outlets. I bet Elon does too. I don't know if that was supposed to be a salute or not, and I anyhow couldn't think much worse of him than I did before the Twitter drama. But I also think parent is right that Elon's brand is entirely poisoned in some circles now, where previously he could barely do wrong.

> I can see that Elon is sometimes being put in a worse light than would be appropriate. Same is true for Trump.

These guys lie about everyone else and go out of their way to put others into worst light that would be appropriate so much ... that this particular complain rings hollow.

Especially when used in the context where their fans are trying to deny something that is available on camera.

The post says

> His nazi salute was probably not a nazi salute

That’s it.

No offense taken. I understand that it offended a lot of Germans but I still don't think it was intended as a nazi salute. He should have apologized - but he's Elon, why would he? He doesn't care if somebody misunderstands him.

Is there any reason to think so? Considering his policies, which parties he supports in Europe, long history of workplace issues in his companies, ...

He has been agreeing with 14 words-style shit on Twitter for almost a year now. Him doing the Nazi salute on public TV just brought more attention to it.

Musk's fascist salutes looked like fascist salutes because they were fascist salutes. He did it deliberately and he did it twice just to make sure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smQNNo2a9xc

These guys loved it: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-mus...

And so does this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/1i68puj/have_we_l...

> His nazi salute was probably not a nazi salute, but it doesn't matter.

Exactly. There actually are reasons one might do a gesture that is nearly identical to a Nazi salute without realizing it. For a while I had mixed up the Nazi salute and some alien salutes (or salutes from alternate dimension humans) from Star Trek.

If for some reason I had found myself addressing a crowd of Trek fans I might have done what I thought was a Klingon or Romulan salute and instead done a Nazi salute.

What matters is what happens afterwards. If my attempted Klingon salute was actually a Nazi salute I would immediately apologize and explain what happened as soon as someone told me I'd done a Nazi salute.

Only Very Online people were really aware of that, though. Once he progressed from insane ranting on Twitter to, well, that salute, it really became obvious to just about everyone.

Interestingly, BYD is selling more cars in the UK than Tesla is.

Most Brits aren't wealthy, BYD are aggressively priced - as are other Chinese brands like Omoda. New prices for full EV compare pretty favourably to ICE cars from the traditional mid-market brands, the Fords / Volkswagens / Vauxhalls.

I doubt that is true.

According to [1], 2024 sales by model (2 Teslas on podium, 0 BYD in top 10):

FULL YEAR 2024 - UK EV sales

Tesla Model Y 32,862

Audi Q4 e-tron 17,621

Tesla Model 3 17,425

MG4 15,651

BMW i4 12,953

Mercedes EQA 11,617

Skoda Enyaq 11,516

Hyundai KONA 10,858

Volvo EX30 9,931

Volkswagen ID.4 8,927

This maches my experience of English roads. I must have seen one BYD (driven by a Chinese...) while Teslas are everywhere now.

[1] https://www.electrifying.com/blog/article/official-figures-s...

Tesla is becoming the new Merc in the Indian community. It seems to becoming the new status symbol car. Not sure what Indians in the UK think of Musk.

It doesn't help that full EVs are still at a kind of progressive-status-symbol stage of the adoption curve - the people who buy them are exactly the same people who'll see all the Nazi crap and be put off by it.

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