Drive a Tesla, get Sieg Heils? Apparently it ain’t easy being green any more

Wow, you don’t convince anyone by not even reading the failed goal in the quote.

Tesla hasn’t failed so I’m not sure what your point is.

Elon Musk’s polygonal pickup is a polarizing sales flop that’s missed the billionaire’s volume goal by a staggering 84%. And there’s no sign that things are improving.

Are you trying to say that that poor sales of it’s truck is a failure of the company? That would be every car company that ever existed was a failure because one of it’s models did poorly.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91086771/6-reasons-why-tesla-is-failing-and-they-all-have-to-do-with-design

All this has seriously damaged Tesla’s brand. In a recent poll, only 13.4% of U.S. adults have a favorable view of Tesla compared to 28.4% in January 2022. J.D. Power puts the company almost at the bottom of its 2022 car quality survey, made using 84,165 verified U.S. owners. Consumer Reports’ 2022 survey ranks Tesla’s reliability at number 19 out of 28 brands in the United States.

Companies including BMW, Ford, Toyota, Kia, and Subaru enjoyed around a 60% loyalty rate in 2022. Tesla’s dismal public image is a big problem that affected the sales plunge. That’s why, according to S&P Global Mobility, Tesla’s U.S. EV market share will continue to drop until it reaches 20% by 2025. As legendary investor and Columbia Business School professor emeritus Bruce Greenwald had already pointed out in 2021: “Twenty years from now, you really think that they’re going to dominate the auto market? Not a chance.”

We are three years into those two decades. This drop is not just a bleep. It’s a sign of much bigger trouble ahead.

BTW, that was last year, before Elon decided to be Wormtongue to the president.

Tesla (TSLA) stock appears to be moving higher as investors look past the disappointing first-quarter results and focus on Chief Executive Elon Musk sticking to a robotaxi rollout in June and his plan to scale back his work for President Donald Trump.

Tesla stock soared 9.8% to 284.91 during Friday’s stock market action, reclaiming the 50-day moving average as it extended its post-earnings. The stock advanced 3.5% to 259.51 on Thursday as the general analyst consensus was positive coming out of the conference call late Tuesday.

That is really a Non sequitur, but ok, it is clear that there is no counter to what was posted. As Bruce Greenwald mentioned, lack of loyalty before and world dislike of what Saruman Trump is doing now with tariffs, are very likely to take Tesla down; short term ups in the stock market are not reliable.

Man, those Democrats are so powerful. They’ve made Tesla’s sales tank this quarter in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, and Italy, as well as in Canada.

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/france-car-registrations-down-1454-march-tesla-sales-fall-3683-2025-04-01/

Yep, “past performance is not indicative of future results”

https://www.reuters.com/pictures/targeting-tesla-anti-musk-protests-around-world-2025-04-10/

Demonstrators protest against Elon Musk at Tesla dealerships around the world.

They are not demonstrating against the car. They are demonstrating against Trump via Musk.

Neither Musk nor Tesla was critical in the technical development of EVs. I have a friend who is a huge proponent of EVs who was driving some kind of custom-made EV before Teslas hit the market. (She’s now driving a Tesla with some anti-musk sticker on it.)

What Musk did very successfully was to market EVs. He took a concept that people compared to a golf cart and made it sexy and desirable. That’s an important thing, even if it isn’t a technological thing.

I wonder if some combination of being too rich and taking too many drugs has addled Musk’s brain, because he seems to have made a lot of business missteps recently, as well as outed himself as a raging racist and generally evil human being.

I assume Tesla stock is going up because the US just eased regulation of US-made robotaxis, and a lot of people still believe that Tesla will be producing those sometime in the next year.

That is fine, but I was talking also about the loyalty reports. Not talking about the protests is like demanding that one factor in the mess should not be mentioned. (and it was also thanks to the Tesla profits that Elon became the power behind the throne)

In this case is like demanding that what the OP was about is not the subject here.

There were certainly many examples of clean-energy cars in modern history before Musk got involved. One of them was Tesla, which Musk did not start. The big American carmakers may not always be shining examples of innovation, but they do innovate, and they’re also not the only carmakers in the world.

GM produced the EV1 electric car decades ago, and Chrysler made a limited-production turbine car, also decades ago. The EV1 was actually very popular with drivers despite the technical limitations of its day including primitive battery technology. Li-ion batteries were key to Tesla’s success and were certainly not invented by Elmo. The reasons for the demise of the EV1 are complicated and mired in company and industry politics, but it wasn’t a technical failure, despite the battery limitations.

The carmakers do innovate. The best examples of automotive innovation are found in the astonishing reliability of today’s cars. To suggest that Musk did much more than just marketing is ill-informed and misleading.

I think one of the reasons that Musk has been pushing the idea that he has Asperger’s is that it not only serves as an excuse for his sociopathic behaviours, but also casts him as an “eccentric genius”. He isn’t, as we can see today, although having the kind of wealth he possesses has its own inertia that at some level become invulnerable. But the Asperger’s claim strikes me as just more marketing, and cynical, callous, and insensitive at that. While it’s true that some people arguably and controversially diagnosed with Asperger’s may exhibit traits like a lack of empathy, lacking empathy is also the hallmark trait of what medical science refers to as “being an asshole”, a non-controversial diagnosis that’s easy to make from a distance.

Well, associating with Trump is a valid reason to demonize someone. And it’s not like he’s just hanging out with Trump, he’s actively participating in the clusterfuck.

You’re giving the Democratic Party way too much credit for their ability to affect anything.

98 year old British WWII vet crushes a Tesla with a Sherman tank.

A decorated veteran of the Allied campaign in Europe, Turner made a strong statement before getting into the tank. He said, “We’ve crushed fascism before, and we’ll crush it again.”

Okay, so this was planned and they didn’t destroy anybody’s property without permission, but the article didn’t answer the question I had before clicking: Whose Tesla was it? And I’m left wondering how much money was spent (or what that Tesla was worth if it was donated).

And of course the headline generated by the link makes the WWII UK vet into a “US War Hero”.

He was probably one of the sailors on the SS-33:

French Tesla renters going to court to get out of their Tesla leases because Elon has made the car an “extreme-right” symbol and destroyed their pleasure in driving it.