Tesla sales are way down, and as a hater of the World's Worst Man and a lover of electric cars that are actually good, this is great news! The latest example of the company's slide comes from Australia, where Tesla sales have backslid a remarkable 72%, but while reading The Guardian's report on those statistics I was reminded of something else that has been bugging me for a while about these cars and their owners.
The story doesn't just revel in the massive sales decline--"Australian Tesla owners [are] troubled by the increasingly extreme rightwing politics of the company’s co-founder, Elon Musk"--but also interviews a few people who are recent Tesla buyers and who, in the wake of DOGE and Nazi salutes and everything else, suddenly feel ashamed to be driving a Tesla around. This is not the first or only interview of this type; people all over Europe and North America are also waking up to the reality that they've spent a lot of money on a car that is now seen by a lot of other people as a symbol of white supremacy and an unchecked oligarchy. Womp.
Not content with being inwardly regretful, though, some of these Tesla owners with a particularly milquetoast strain of buyer's remorse have started putting stickers on their cars that say stuff like "Anti Elon Tesla Club" and "I bought this before Elon went crazy".
These people are the most perfect encapsulation of the dire state of political and media literacy that has helped lead us to these Bad Times. Elon Musk called a cave rescue hero a paedophile seven years ago. The company has faced multiple lawsuits and investigations over everything from lying about its dangerous autopilot features to exaggerating their specs and stats (in particular the range of the cars) to privacy violations related to Tesla's inbuilt security cameras.
Musk went full Nazi as far back as 2022, when he purchased Twitter, reinstated a bunch of previously-banned abusers and fascists and began promoting white supremacist propaganda. When it comes to Musk being a Nazi, and the company being more of a stock market con than a car manufacturer, the writing has been on the wall for a very long time.
Unless you bought a Tesla a very long time ago, you don't get to do this. Their cars have always sucked, have been outmatched by rivals since at least 2021, and Musk has been very publicly heading down this path for a lot longer than many of these suddenly-regretful idiots have owned their cars. If you bought a Tesla in 2021-25 you made a bad decision, you don't read enough, you don't do basic market research, and now you're stuck with the consequences of that decision.
If these sticker-buying Tesla owners truly had a conscience, if they really felt that his Nazi sympathies were going to impact their own personal lives by association, they'd simply sell their cars, and if there was a financial hit to take, they would take it. Putting a sticker on the back while continuing to drive and pay for a Tesla is exactly the kind of empty gesture you'd expect from a liberal in 2025, the most meaningless act possible in the face of something that calls for genuine action, and it deserves as much mockery and scorn as...driving a Tesla.
