Seems perfectly reasonable to vandalize any car better than mine.
This. Pretty sure it’s a class-related thing. The Model S was the first Tesla to really make it big, and it was known to be an expensive and unique car. Expensive+unique = “that asshole thinks he’s better than me, and ima take him down a notch.”
I’m in New York City. It’s not happening here (at least not that I know about).
There aren’t that many Teslas around here, I think mainly because if you want a Tesla, you have to have a place to charge it, which means you have to have a parking space with an electrical hookup. That is definitely not the norm in NYC, although I think we’ll see more and more parking garages offering charging facilities (which will mean that in NYC, Teslas will be available only to the affluent, because garage parking runs close to $500 per month here).
I’m seeing this in various news reports. Mostly from what you’d call Trump country. Admittedly, I may be being unfair in assuming all or most of the Tesla vandalizers are Trump supporters, but that’s the impression I get.
I’m on the same planet you’re on.
I’ve described the reports of Tesla vandalism that I’ve seen.
As to left-wingers hating Musk, I have no idea. I’m about as left-wing as you can get. While Musk seems to be a bit of a jerk personally, I really like what he’s doing with Tesla, and I admire anyone who can get something like that off the ground and turn it into reality.
Uber is another story. I *do *hate Uber. 
Oh, I agree 100% that it’s a class thing. I just don’t think it’s a left-wing class thing.
[Emphasis mine]
How does this work?
$10,000 will buy roughly 4,500 gallons of unleaded at $2.20/gallon. Assuming an ICE powered vehicle the size of a Leaf would get around 25 miles/gallon (probably closer to 30), that’s over 100,000 miles, or over 25,000 miles per year, about twice what the average driver puts on their car. That turns 4-years into 8-years, and also conveniently ignores the fact that the electricity to power the Leaf isn’t free.
I’d also like to see a 2017-2018 Leaf that hasn’t been wrecked sell for less than $15,000. You might find some older, higher mileage ones for less than $10,000, but to expect those to last the 8 years (or more) you’d need to see to get them to “pay for themselves in fuel savings alone…” is also a bit optimistic. I’m not saying that the leaf wouldn’t be fuel efficient, but it wouldn’t pay for itself.
I see dozens of Teslas every day around Boston, and there’s no vandalism making the news around here. There’s also essentially no coal rolling in the area either, or ICEing. Either one of those would get attention quickly. Perhaps it’s more regional.
In a lot of Europe, the kind of stuff that 20 years ago only the “radical fringe” Greens cared about has now become mainstream. Much of it is not even considered politics any more: those questions which back then were “is this thing a real problem?” have morphed into “what is the best way to solve it?” and become a daily-life thing for much of the population including lots of people whose general opinion on politics is “I don’t give a shit, they’re all thieves anyway”.
You’re almost certainly not “as left-wing as you can get” if you’re not familiar with this. The people who are super against Tesla are typically literal anarcho-communists (or similar).
Elon Musk is basically a literal spy movie evil genius at this point. It’s not just the wealth, per se, but the exploitation of labor (e.g.), near slave-labor conditions for some lower level workers (which Amazon does too), and a bunch of other smaller baffling-but-super-shitty things like this (among many others). If you’ve seen “Sorry To Bother You” his reputation and practices are getting seen to be on the road towards the corporation at the center of that film (though Amazon is by far the bigger culprit here).
… all that said I don’t really see what doing all this accomplishes other than a small sense of trolly self-satisfaction, maybe making people slightly less likely to buy one. It’s a statement more than anything, really. Possibly some sliver of hope that a journalist or people like me writing about the reasons for this might raise some awareness about Musk and Tesla’s dodgy practices and spur more widespread dislike of and resistance towards them.
Not at all free. For the stated range and battery capacity, assuming you get electricity for 14 cents per kW-hr, the Leaf costs 3.9 cents per mile for electricity. 100,000 miles? $3925.
But $10,000 isn’t the right number to look at. When you’re considering buying a Leaf, you’re also considering other car options, and those all cost money, too. If a comparable used gas-burning car costs, say, $6000, then the amount you’re paying extra to get the electric car is only $4000. And yes, you’re still paying for the electricity, but in most places energy is cheaper in the form of electricity than in the form of gasoline, and electric cars are inherently more efficient (because you’re not running a heat engine in the car, and you can take advantage of things like regenerative braking), so you’re not paying very much for the electricity.
And $2.20/gal isn’t right for me either. Think $4+.
When I bought my Bolt, between the dealer price reduction, GM cash back, and the Federal, State and power company incentives, the car was not more than anything else I was considering. Icing on the cake is that my solar panels produce more electricity than we use. It’s more cost effective to use that electricity in the car than take the minimal end of year payout for the credits.
And having to wait 2+ hours to get a device looked at or making an appointment for weeks away is the main reason I’d never own an iPhone. I felt awful for my daughter when she had to go a week or two without an iPhone because hers wasn’t working. Personally, I don’t think that’s acceptable for an adult, especially when they don’t have a landline.
Oh, and having to shell out way, way, way too much money for a charger after you buy a generic one and they won’t let you use it.
PS regarding the long wait to get the phone looked at, someone once said ‘what else are you gonna do…what do you do when your android isn’t working’. They didn’t seem to understand that I can go to the Verizon store, be seen within 5 minutes and walk out with a fixed or replaced phone. And, if the store is too crowded, I can just go to another Verizon store a few miles away. They’re all over the place. When my kid’s iPhone was broken and the Apple store had a 2+ hour wait, my other option was to take my chances at the next closest store, about 45 minutes away.
You’re right, my math isn’t correct. I was thinking of California gas prices since Tesla is a California company (which should be unrelated).
If gas is $2.60 a gallon and the energy equivalent of a gallon of gasoline in electricity is $0.75 then it’ll take 5400 gallons of gas to make up the price difference. That’s closer to 135k miles and more than 4 years with the 12-18k miles people drive per year.
Few buckets of Tesla hate here, some justified:
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Teslas are seen as luxury vehicles with luxury pricetags (conspicuous consumption), and are targeted accordingly.
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Teslas are perceived as being driven by smug, holier-than-thou, leftie environmental types.
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“Tesla fans” often have major superiority complexes, and rabidly attack any perceived criticism of vehicle performance, manufacturing quality, or prophet Elon Musk, and there is a predicable counter-reaction to that.
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Tesla, and EV’s in general are new and different, and people are scared of new and different. And the media especially likes to cover failures of anything new and different, hence why a single Tesla vehicle fire will make national news.
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Tesla’s CEO is someone that is impulsive, eccentric, and self-promoting, and tends to make promises that are not delivered upon or are years late.
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Tesla, as a company, seems to have some shady accounting practices, lots of employee burnout, and its stock price is crazy overvalued relative to its actual production.
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Teslas benefit from government subsidies, even though they are essentially luxury vehicles.
Depreciation on non-Tesla EVs is very large. For example, a search comparing the Fiat 500e and non-e versions shows that 2016 500e with 20-30k miles is $9-12k, with similar mileage non-e (non-Abarth) cars starting at about $13k. If your daily needs are within the abilities of a Leaf, 500e, etc., then a used one can be cheaper to buy and cheaper to operate than a comparable ICE car. I chose the 500e, because it has a direct model comparison to an ICE car. You can compare a Leaf and Versa, or Bolt and Cruze, but in both cases the EV models are higher end cars, with amenities not found in the similar lower end cars.
As for real world, in one year of a owning a Model 3 I’ve saved about $900 in gas for 11,000 miles of use compared to the car the Model 3 replaced. That ain’t nothin’, but yeah, it’s not going to makeup the difference between the Model 3 and a base model Camry. I suspect most people aren’t cross shopping a base Camry and a Model 3, though. My net purchase price for the Model 3 is very similar, if not cheaper, than comparable BMW, Audi, and other entry level luxury cars.
I have never seen any of that happen and the only people I know that own Tesla’s are Conservative CEO types. I’m going to guess a good portion of this is ahole jealously.
Where is it that you’re seeing these reports?
I think this has more to do with your news source than much else. America is a big country, so it’s not that hard to find individual cases where people are being dicks of all sorts. But it seems more likely that you’re tuned into Tesla-specific (perhaps Tesla-as-target-of-persecution-specific) news than that this is really meaningful trend.
On the Leaf front, Carmax has multiple 2015 Leafs with ~50k miles on them for sale around $11k. Carmax charges pretty high prices for used vehicles, so it should be fairly easy to get one from a private seller in similar condition for under $10k. If you’re considering a Leaf vs a gasoline-driven car, then the difference in price is going to be a lot less than that. Maybe just $3-4k.
Where I live gas costs $4+, so if the electricity costs $0.75 for a gallon equivalent, then we’re looking at (ballpark) 1000 gallons of gas to make up the difference, which is 3-4 years of costs.
So as a general claim, if you pay $4+/gallon for gas, then replacing a $7k used gasoline car with a $10k used Leaf should break even in 4ish years.
That’s a nice analysis, but you incorrect. The right number to look at IS $10,000.
Wesley did not claim that they would cover the marginal cost over a comparably sized gas-burning car. The claim was that they should pay for themselves in fuel savings alone in 4 years. That is a rather extraordinary claim. Not only is the purchase price unrealistic for a car less than 3 years old in good condition, but $10,000 will buy a lot of fuel.
As electric cars get older, the reliability of the batteries starts being an issue; perhaps this is why at around the 5 year mark, their cost drops. Loss of battery capacity means even shorter range, and at that point
Back in 1974 or so there were definitely people who considered buying Japanese cars, which had become popular after the oil crisis, as unpatriotic. I remember some being banned from parking lots. Maybe this was similar.
It was easier to wave a flag than to admit that American cars then were crap. I know - I owned a Pinto.