Summary
Elon Musk’s vocal support for Donald Trump and promotion of far-right conspiracy theories has alienated many Tesla owners, who now express embarrassment over their cars.
Sales of anti-Musk stickers, such as “Anti Elon Tesla Club,” have surged as owners distance themselves from Musk’s politics.
Once admired by liberals for his environmental advocacy, Musk’s alignment with Trump and leadership in his administration have sparked backlash.
While Tesla remains the dominant EV maker, analysts warn Musk’s polarizing image may impact sales as competition grows and Trump plans to cut EV tax incentives.
I want “I got this before Elon went crazy”
But I drive a Civic
I want “I still did, tho” on the other side
🤣
While Tesla remains the dominant EV maker
Well actually they don’t, they’ve been surpassed by BYD.
Expect like 200% tariffs on those going to the US
Yes AFAIK BYD is not available in USA, they are in most of the rest of the world though.
And the Musk shame is not isolated to USA either.AFAIK BYD is working on a factory in Mexico, so maybe USA will get them from there in the future?
BYD is working on a factory in Mexico
I love the fact that Chinese companies are outsourcing production to America, now.
Volvo and Polestar are made in Sweden and owned by the Chinese today. Both are pretty popular in EU.
I rent a lot of cars for work travel and BYDs are nowhere near as nice as Teslas to drive. That will change in time though, and their batteries are already better I believe.
I’ve only seen one review, I think it was called Dolphin. Overall the car was reviewed as OK to very good for the price here in Denmark, but the handling was awful.
It shall be interesting to see how well the new LiFePo batteries do, the current gen Blade batteries are allegedly good, but have proven to not be quite as safe as they were supposed to be. Safety was supposed to be a big feature of blade batteries. But in reality, they are only marginally better than other batteries.
2018 he called a diver that saved kids a pedo. Anyone who bought a Tesla after that can get fucked.
A year after Tesla was started, he invested into it with shitloads of money.
Then he sued Tesla for the “right” to be called a “founder”.
Worlds most whiny kickstarter supporter
You say that but it’s a pretty recent development that there was any significant alternatives to Tesla in the American EV space. Even now that is one of the only options for buying used at a reasonable price. That is finally starting to change but for a lot of people between 2018 and now the choice was between buying another ICE vehicle or a Tesla. I don’t blame people for overlooking some of Elon’s faults in order to help address climate change, especially since the really crazy side of him wasn’t widely publicized until two-ish years ago.
I would say it started around the pandemic, about 4 years ago
Ooh, maybe this means cheaper used Teslas.
…but then you’d have to drive a Tesla. Shit.
Are there hacking projects around them? It might be worth it if there are.
There are already people pulling the EV transaxles out of wreaks and putting them in better cars with custom controllers.
Aside from the musk debacle, it’s fun to think about a brand new generation of car enthusiasts hacking and customizing EVs similar to all the current “car guys” are with ICs. I hope it takes off.
I’ve been following Edison Motors and you can buy the EV transaxle from the electric Mustang as a crate engine from Ford with. Edison hasn’t announced being able to buy individual parts, but they support Right to Repair, so once the kits start rolling out, parts should be as well. They’re a startup and are smartly advertising only a few options to keep the new supply chain simple.
I have definitely been considering buying used so that I don’t support Elon. That’s the most important thing to me.
I did exactly that. There are ways to even pull your car off the cell network so they can’t actively harvest your driving data
Nice thought but unfortunately it still supports new tesla sales by propping up the secondary market.
That’s assuming someone is selling their old Tesla to buy a new Tesla. Hopefully they won’t. I own one and I wouldn’t buy one again.
Meanwhile, cybertruck owners are doubling down on their wankpanzer purchase.
Cyber truck owners seem like the same people that previously were making fun of EVs.
While I appreciate the gender neutrality, it made me wonder: are there any women who voluntarily own a cyber truck? Every douchebag I see in or posing with one is a guy.
are there ANY women who voluntarily own a cyber truck?
Emphasis by me.
That’s a weird question, because obviously there are some, probably about 12% according to stats:
https://motorandwheels.com/pickup-truck-demographics-segments/12% of pickup truck owners being women absolutely does not mean 12% of cyber truck owners are women, that’s truck ownership by women among all brands.
I’m saying I think one brand and one specific truck model probably is doing even worse among women than trucks in general.
There’s not many women who own trucks in general, cyber or otherwise.
I’m going to need some data for that one before I believe it. In the US, I have known many women who own trucks. I have lived in rural and urban areas and both had plenty of women who owned and drove trucks, including semi cabs. I could believe less by comparison but not “not many” without some data.
Obviously it’s relative compared to men.
Indirectly implied, women have a generally better safety record than men, and Trucks have the worst safety record. So there might be a trend that fewer women than men drive trucks for safety reasons.
In my experience women generally prefer smaller cars, which also would mean that trucks are not generally preferred by women.
Also when you look at professional cargo truck drivers, there’s an overwhelming majority of men.
Trucks and pickup trucks are used for things that are bulky and heavy, women generally don’t do as much physical heavy lifting as men.All these facts, put together with personal experience, that indeed more men than women drive trucks, fit together, and I see absolutely no evidence against it.
You can very quickly make your own survey. Go to Youtube and search cybertruck or just truck, and see how many men and women post either.
Edit:
I just did the youtube search myself, and I had to scroll past 20 videos before the first featuring a woman turned up, something about the 70’s being great?!Edit 2:
https://motorandwheels.com/pickup-truck-demographics-segments/88% of pickup truck buyers identify as male.
https://mobile.guideautoweb.com/en/articles/55986/5-surprising-facts-about-pickups-and-their-owners/ https://www.core77.com/posts/100454/Surprising-Design-Research-Insights-About-Pickup-Truck-Owners
Guess it’s all about who is running the survey. And, I did say drive not purchased new.
This whole thing reads like an advertising piece: Everybody buys pickup trucks disregarding age or gender, and the only thing that can make them give it up is not having sex… Seems like garbage to me. This is NOT consistent with my pretty obvious findings on youtube, and the research I posted earlier.
The study I linked to is much less biased, and reflected my findings looking at youtube videos.Here’s another study that shows very similar results to the one I posted earlier:
https://www.zippia.com/pick-up-truck-driver-jobs/demographics/
Male, 89.7%
Female, 10.3%
There are plenty of Ag women around me driving trucks. And if we’re including SUVs, which the cybertruck is more similar to then any real truck, that number goes way up. Especially among mothers, toxic maternity pushes SUV sales. “I just don’t seem safe picking up little Timmy in anything other then a 3 ton tank.”
Obviously, since an SUV is considered a great family car.
https://motorandwheels.com/pickup-truck-demographics-segments/
88% of pickup truck buyers identify as male.
That doesn’t mean that SUVs are good family vehicles. Station Wagons and Minivans existed before SUV. The added weight of SUVs only created a danger for other drivers and pedestrians.
I’m just dropping this here too. I don’t want the previous stat being cited as absolute fact when it seems there is quite a variance on who did what study.
https://mobile.guideautoweb.com/en/articles/55986/5-surprising-facts-about-pickups-and-their-owners/ https://www.core77.com/posts/100454/Surprising-Design-Research-Insights-About-Pickup-Truck-Owners
They seem like the same asshats who would block EV’s in at the chargers or take EV parking spots at malls/stores with their overcompensating trucks
adds ‘wankpanzer’ to lexicon
You might like Incelcamino too, I shamelessly stole it from someone else here.
I myself use a bicycle for local travel, and public transit for longer commutes. Musk’s overpriced EVs are not the solution to global warming, IMO.
EVs were not made to save the environment. They were made to save the auto industry.
To be honest, it was almost like they tried to prove EV wasn’t feasible, making ridiculously laughable small cars that could only go 60 km/h, and had even worse range. Then they claimed it should be hydrogen, which for a decade went absolutely nowhere. That was until Tesla proved a functional attractive EV was indeed possible.
I hate Elon Musk, but Tesla was a huge leap forward for fully battery electric cars.Good thing that Tesla was doing this thing before Musk came along. All Musk did was buy it.
Absolutely, Musk didn’t create the concept or invent anything, he just bought the right thing at the right time. And had some very skillful people working for him. Something only possible if you already have money. Still Tesla struggled early on financially, and he did mange to help Tesla through to success. I don’t think he was as crazy back then as he is now.
Tesla didn’t even do anything new. They put the right product to market at the right time.
This is not true, Tesla did a lot of things that were new. They used Lithium batteries, made an electric car that was fast sporty and had long range, instead of the typical “city” electrics. And they built a charging network.
To say the Tesla wasn’t new, is like saying iPhone wasn’t new, because smartphones already existed.Funny you should mention iPhone, because it was the same thing. Yes the whole package didn’t exist in that form, but all the parts were already in use. They both got lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.
Lithium batteries hadn’t been used before because the technology had just reached the point where they were viable for use in a vehicle. Electric motor technology had also just reached the price to performance to size necessary to make a sporty vehicle. The original Tesla was unique for it’s time, but not because of some genius design. They were just lucky enough to be doing it at a time when others tech was reaching the punt that made it possible.
The Palm Treo I had when the iPhone came out could do all of the stuff the iPhone could do, but you had to work at it. I miss that phone…
No that’s not funny, that was on purpose, because all the elements already existed, but nobody had put it together to work nearly as well.
When iPhone came out, it completely obliterated Blackberry Microsoft and Nokia in the smartphone market. It was so far ahead in design probably about 10 years. So you can’t claim they did nothing new. Please note that I don’t personally use Apple products, because I find their control freak ecosphere policy disgusting, I made that decision already in the early 90’s, and Apple has only gotten worse since, so I haven’t changed my decision not to use their products. But when I saw the presentation of the iPhone and the iPad because I’m a tech nerd, I immediately saw it was a superior product to anything on the market at the time.
With Tesla it’s very similar, other car makers messed around with embarrassing underwhelming lackluster designs with maybe 40 km range and ugly 2 seater city car format, that could generally only do 60-80 km/h. GM had had a research project with a pretty cool looking car, but it was run at a massive deficit, and was still expensive to buy, and it was still underwhelming.
The Prius was probably the height of electric even though it was only a hybrid, at the time, and could only do 7km on battery! SAo not much of a hybrid. And Toyota allegedly sold that at a deficit too! Many claimed that what Tesla aimed to do was impossible.
So no matter how much I despise both Apple and Musk, it must be acknowledged that they were ahead of their time with groundbreaking products.Being ahead by about 10 years is not just luck. That takes ingenuity and a lot of clever engineering. Musk was not responsible for either, he just stepped in and bought Tesla at the right time.
I appreciate that people love to gargle tech Bros, but the truth of the matter is what they were most lucky with was having access to the capital necessary to bring those ideas to market. Do you think Steve Jobs or Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning were the only ones to have the idea to put those technologies together? They were just the ones lucky enough to have the means to do it.
It is a bit more complex than that. EVs are the necessary replacement for use cases where a car is needed. It is far from reality to think, that we are able to life in a world without cars. There are use cases where a car is absolutely required and here EVs are better than gasoline powered ones. However, a lot of people don’t really need one. Especially in the bigger cities it is very easy to live without a car(its also sometimes much faster because when driving in the city you are standing/crawling forwards most of the time)
And the majority of that is the auto industry’s fault.
Not one penny will I willingly give to this monster.
Once admired by liberals for his environmental advocacy,
They now know him for the liar that he is.
brainstorms a hellscape situation where a Tesla is regulated into your ownership and every American is forcibly taxed to pay for it
“THANKS FOR THE FREE CAR BASED ELON”
~ Conservatives
You better keep an eye on that goddamn phone, buddy, I’m calling it next year.
I have a beater 97 Corolla. Don’t care about stuff hitting it one bit. I wanna get some kind of funny sticker that’s like “at least it’s not a Tesla” or something like that
Get a sticker “My other car is a piece of shit too.”
Former owner here. Such a relief to be rid of it. Never again as long as Musk remains at Tesla.
I prefer to cut off Teslas because nobody is letting me in anyways, and they’ve got automatic safety braking. Yes, my signal is on.
i don’t give a shit. not driving
i don’t give a sh
Gonna stop you right there.
Can confirm. Am one. Bought in 2018
You need one of these: https://www.amazon.com/Tesla-Bumper-Sticker-Bought-Accessories/dp/B0C4KHKN4S
May impact sales…
Let’s face it, people seem to be able to tolerate a lot of shit before they ever actually start showing how they feel with their wallets.
IDK about new car figures, but I’m in the market for another EV. I found a Tesla model 3 long range awd that had done about 150k km, and a Renault Zoe with 15k km and 2/3 the range. The Renault is slightly cheaper, but it’s Musk being a loose canon that’s the reason why I’m going with the Zoe instead. Sure it’s a nicer car, if it works, but the fear that Musk get’s high and disables non-essential stuff is too real.
So in my case Musk has directly affected my used car choice.
Does the Zoe have conventional door handles? Cause the functional design of Tesla’s leaves a lit to be desired anyway.
AFAIK yes, at least I didn’t notice anything strange, and I believe the one I looked at in the comparison (at a dealership) even had a proper keyhole in the driver door.
Oh I don’t know, the Budweiser stock hit endured pretty lengthy after being advertised by a non-redneck.
So sell it? Plenty of musk fanboys will buy and selling used will reduce his income. Unless there are some non-transferable nonsenses that discourage private transfer?
I’m in the market for a used EV - I won’t touch a Tesla (not just because of Musk, but he’s a part of it).
🤷♂️
