[flagged]
That said, if you'd hav picked Toyota or Volvo when writing your comment you'd be correct. Those OEMs could literally put coal rolling diesels backed by Nissan CVTs in Yugo chassis and the "everything I know about cars I learned from internet comments and car-mags in my dentist waiting room" crowd would defend them.
Its telling about your bias, not Tesla or Musk.
Or it should be. Instead you blame the victims of the hoax for your inability to discern something is a hoax (and a pretty obvious one).
I can see the rationale behind it but it has very dysfunctional and unhealthy outcomes.
Tesla, due to Musk, is an absolute outlier here.
It's telling on the users in question and their relationship with reality.
It’s telling to Tesla’s brand reputation. This will take decades and billions of dollars to repair, if it even can be fixed.
Tesla may become synonymous with cars-as-internet-of-shit. Same as how Italian cars to this day are the butt of every reliability joke. This reputation has followed them since the 90’s. British cars are synonymous with cheap construction – a reputation they built in the 70’s.
Stuff like this can be forever.
In reality, people who believed this probably think Elon is a petty tyrant and don't like his politics. I agree with them, especially on the first point. The difference is that they either allow this to overwhelm their critical thinking skills, or never had any to begin with.
Because Tesla’s brand perception is that of a shady company who would do something like this and nobody would be surprised. How they built that reputation I don’t know, lots of little things over the years.
But Elon Musk has made himself the face of Tesla, used that power in other contexts to go after critics, and the Cybertruck had a bizarre anti resale clause when released and Tesla have made a habit of features-as-a-service with remote software deactivations when other vehicles are resold.
So in the specific case here, the reaction very much represents a big brand sentiment problem attributable to concrete issues.
More seriously, the correct reaction to a fake is to adjust towards whatever the fake is moving your away from. If the fake wants you to believe Tesla is a company that will brick your car while driving — adjust towards it being more likely that they won’t, because if it were, there would be no need to fake it.
Saying instead “huh, I guess my priors were right all along because of how many people believed it” is…yeah, an interesting way of thinking.
Surely there were a bunch of automotive engineers on Reddit getting downvoted to oblivion for suggesting that this doesn't pass a sniff test because it arguably violates subsection 69 of FMVSS 420 or that they don't need to do that because industry standard is to just prevent the car from starting next time, or whatever.