Tesla protests gain momentum while the hate is dividing Tesla owners

Never going back to ICE (though we're keep our Subaru Forester for camping, etc.), but buying another brand when our Tesla lease runs out; there are other great options out there. (I would try to find someone to take over our Tesla lease but when I spoke to a dealer about this he said that lots of people are trying to do this now so I'm not likely to succeed.)

With solar panels, we’re paying close to nothing for electricity. The panels and batteries cost about as much as an EV when we got them, but manufacturing costs have dropped and keep dropping.

Starting roughly this year, vehicle to home (V2H) will be mostly standard. That will let you use your car battery to top-off the house battery. That’ll make full-off-grid much more practical, which puts a ceiling on PG&E’s abusive rate hikes.

Interestingly, the savings from parking fees are a thousandfold more worth it than the gas stuff.

Nearly every time I (and likely you) buy something, it's produced by, transported by, funded by, owned by a company or in a country that has been found guilty of repeated human rights violations. Literal genocides in an alarming number of instances.

It almost feels cathartic for the externalities of the society we've built to be burdened by us, rather than someone in another country.

That being said, I agree with the self-interest aspect and would also prefer not to be targeted by extremists on either side. The real trick is figuring out who that's going to be ahead of time - my money would have been on Chinese EV's being hit before Tesla.

- CEO running multiple companies: "Genius! Superstar! Incredible!"

- Working class guy working multiple jobs: "Hard worker! Hustler! Lifting his family out of poverty!"

- Office worker with more than one full-time job: "Overemployed! Fraud! Double-dipping!"

...don't forget also playing Path of Exile 2 80 hours a week...

kinda funny that even after that came out and everyone had a laugh nobody really asked if maybe his real contributions on the business side of things are just as illusionary as his gaming accomplishments.

He seems to have a default assumption himself that if left unchecked each IC in his companies and the federal government aren't providing value commiserate with their compensation... and these days when it comes to people involved in politics I just assume based on accumulated evidence that every accusation is a confession.

Beyond politics, this is simply an exercise in CEO malpractice.

Brands and the marketing around them are extremely important to large long-term companies like TSLA presumably is.

In car companies, as its been explained to me, branding is even more important because a consistent positive attachment of existing car owners to the brand is critically important for the biggest source of a car company's customers: the existing ones.

A car is daily used item, a piece of a consumer's ego, a large scale purchase that almost everyone has emotional not just rational investment.

Tesla the car company probably had two fundamental archetypes as purchasers: a techno-geek gee-whiz buyer, and a left-leaning pro-environmental buyer. It's hard to figure out what proportion is which, but let's just say it is at least 50% pro-environment.

Your customers are basically your brand. And the Tesla brand has completely destroyed the pro-environmental crowd. And not just vaguely turned them off. It has angrily reversed them.

Tesla has no marketing department, or very little. It does little advertising. It relied on passionate owners, and of the two archetypes, the techno-gee-whiz is the less passionate, because they are always looking for the next best thing.

The pro-environment crowd was the most emotionally invested, because Tesla represented one of the few hopes for improving the environment over the ICE / petroleum iron grip on transportation. But that emotional investment didn't turn to indifference.

It turned to betrayal and anger.

In Europe, you have compounded this with anti-American sentiment and creepy pro-Russian propangada parroting as well as fascist politics meddling.

On top of all this, Tesla is fundamentally an urban brand. Charging infrastructure sucks in rural areas and driving distances are higher, so urban/suburban drivers buy them, which aligns with the progressive/Democratic buyer profile.

So with the vast anger towards Musk, a driver of a Tesla gets a daily emotional rebuff, from both Musk's daily headlines, to covert looks of dismissal, to overt confrontation, mocking, and danger of vandalism.

So, is there some massive pool of conservative voters ready to enthusiastically buy Teslas? The Cybertruck has been fundamentally rejected by the pickup crowd, and angry young men of that segment are the youth movement of the far-right Republican party. The rest are change-resistant older people, or the miniscule numbers of the wealthy.

The weak response of many Tesla owners is to blame the people as wrongfully blaming Tesla for Musk's actions, which is just a ridiculous notion. CEO does Sieg Heils on national TV. CEO gets money and fame from Tesla. CEO is STILL CEO of Tesla after Sieg Heils.

Those Sieg Heils should be immediate termination grounds for Musk, and a forced selloff in any functioning democracy. There is ample evidence of Twitter dogwhistles and his public statements in support of AfD that there is no "roman salute" or "he's just autistic" that can be argued with a straight face. Public Sieg Heils are not trolling, they are a fundamental offense on democracy. Fascism's very purpose is to contravene democratic principles to gain authoritarian control, and not a benevolent dictatorship. The path of fascism explicitly uses appeals to the darkest side of humanity, and so the authoritarianism will be of the very evil sort, and that comes from a philosophically moral relativist.

On top of that, Musk has hitched himself to a trade warring administration, which will doom Tesla in China, either from indirect edicts from the CCP to not buy Teslas, to outright seizing of their factories and assets if/when the Taiwan saber rattling and cold war expands.

And I could detail a dozen other CEO failures: Cybertruck bust. Semi misexecution. Solar is a joke. Should have acquires a struggling ICE company (like Nissan) for stock swap funny money to gain platforms/engineeers/production capacity. Only basically make two models of mass market cars. Only has one brand and doesn't have other branding levels. Failure of battery day execution/no novel drivetrain or battery technology. Failed to become the premier EV infrastructure provider (and has joined to a administration that will drop the funding). Should have introduced PHEVs in a separate company to apply battery production to more cars. Should have lines in ebikes, power tools, yard tools, anything that is battery-electric. Should have industrial applications and drivetrains. Should actually show up to work.

The only question that remains is whether or not his brand is still salvageable. I'm leaning towards "no", he has taken things really far now. People are pretty fickle. But he is doing some really extreme things and I think it's going to be hard to walk back. Personally I think the emperor has no clothes but let's see.

Based on what China has been doing with EVs, I'm even questioning the narrative that he actually had much to do with kicking off the EV revolution, or whether or not it was going to happen regardless. I think it's the later. China was already going to be the dominant player and was already moving in the EV direction because their dependence on foreign oil wasn't to their benefit.

However, his collusion with the administration to actively make people's lives miserable—without proper oversight, due process, or accountability—has been a breaking point for me. The blatant conflict of interest has led me to significantly reduce my activity on X. This creates a dilemma, as many of the people I interact with are in Japan, where X remains extremely popular since the Twitter era. Most of them are unlikely to migrate elsewhere simply because they aren’t directly affected by his political actions.

The situation might be different for Tesla owners, but I’m not sure they were necessarily “overlooking” his statements. People have varying levels of tolerance when it comes to "canceling" products due to the actions of their owners.

It wouldn't be the first time the worlds richest mans house of cards comes crumbling down due to over confidence and over exposure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivar_Kreuger

it's a good thing Elon is addicted to the limelight and won't let them move on. Makes his eventual downfall faster.

> its a very, very long way to go before the protesting hits him where it actually counts.

What counts if not the one thing he brags about. I'm sure the first blow to his ego is no longer being the richest person on the planet. Well, 2nd blow. Getting ratio'd on his own platform was probably the first stone cast.