It certainly adds to it, especially here in Germany.
However, the number of times I heard comments like »I don’t want to worry about my car not starting if Musk starts throwing a tantrum« has been quite constant the last couple of months if not years – news about Starlink not working, support layoffs at Twitter, such things. And the target audience of Tesla is people who hear and care about such things.
The “Roman salute” you’re referring to never existed in history up until the 19th century when popular media introduced it. It’s fiction, it resonated with Italian facist which is why they started using it.
Yes the "Roman salute" was quite possibly invented by Jacques-Louis David. So what? The question isn't "did the salute match what actually was used 2,000 years ago," but "what salute did Elon Musk think he was doing?"
Either it was a real fascist salute, or a Hollywood roman salute. Either one is deeply troubling.
Tell you what: if it wasn't, then any sane person doing it would be mortified of the accusation that it was, and would do their utmost to emphatically ensure everyone that it wasn't.
So either it was, or Musk is simply not sane. Or both.
It was clearly something that looked a lot like a Nazi salute. And it was twice, this wasn't just an unfortunate camera angle. And Elon has been commenting (positively) on tweets by various extreme right figures for a long time now, so there is additional information here as well.
Does it matter if it was or it wasn't, specifically intended to be a NAZI salute?
He's acting like a NAZI in every relevant way except the symbolic and superficial. (Well... except for that one very public time.)
He's very aggressively and openly supporting far-right parties, including the AfD in Germany.
He's suggested to Germans to get over the shame of their past -- guess what he's referring to here!
He basically owns the US Executive branch in the same way that fascists "integrate" business and politics.
He loves to single out vulnerable minority groups for public vilification (the transgendered), including personally taking steps to materially harm them.
Him and Trump together want to control the racial makeup of the country, and have collaborated on mass arrests and deportations.
Etc...
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and salutes like a duck...
Weird that comments point out this obvious truth are all downvoted. Also, he is firing all FBI agents that worked on the case against Capitol attack. They are succeeding in making legal system composed of loyalist that will not prosecute his people crimes, but will abuse political oposition.
Not only does it look like a Nazi salute to most people, Nazis also took it as a sign that he's one of them. His representative in Rome called in a Roman salute (same thing) before quickly deleting it.
It's a Nazi salute to everybody except a handful of people who are desperately in denial about it.
Where I am, the UK, it's definitely a topic of conversation, similarly Tesla's have been popular. However, the Tesla brand is increasingly being perceived as being toxic here. I'd attribute that entirely to Musk.
It will be interesting to see how it unfolds, particularly amongst current Tesla owners, as if that base shrinks the company could be in real trouble.
Yeah but now people think he's turned completely nazi. His nazi salute was probably not a nazi salute, but it doesn't matter. People's perception of him has flipped completely. He spent a lot of his remaining goodwill.
Could you elaborate? I'm German and reasonably patriotic, but I don't get why you'd want to down vote parent.
Edit: To elaborate: I can see that Elon is sometimes being put in a worse light than would be appropriate. Same is true for Trump. I cheekily think they kinda deserve it, but having run a company that was in the media a lot, you do get unfair coverage from the best outlets. I bet Elon does too. I don't know if that was supposed to be a salute or not, and I anyhow couldn't think much worse of him than I did before the Twitter drama. But I also think parent is right that Elon's brand is entirely poisoned in some circles now, where previously he could barely do wrong.
> I can see that Elon is sometimes being put in a worse light than would be appropriate. Same is true for Trump.
These guys lie about everyone else and go out of their way to put others into worst light that would be appropriate so much ... that this particular complain rings hollow.
Especially when used in the context where their fans are trying to deny something that is available on camera.
No offense taken. I understand that it offended a lot of Germans but I still don't think it was intended as a nazi salute. He should have apologized - but he's Elon, why would he? He doesn't care if somebody misunderstands him.
He has been agreeing with 14 words-style shit on Twitter for almost a year now. Him doing the Nazi salute on public TV just brought more attention to it.
Musk's fascist salutes looked like fascist salutes because they were fascist salutes. He did it deliberately and he did it twice just to make sure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smQNNo2a9xc
> His nazi salute was probably not a nazi salute, but it doesn't matter.
Exactly. There actually are reasons one might do a gesture that is nearly identical to a Nazi salute without realizing it. For a while I had mixed up the Nazi salute and some alien salutes (or salutes from alternate dimension humans) from Star Trek.
If for some reason I had found myself addressing a crowd of Trek fans I might have done what I thought was a Klingon or Romulan salute and instead done a Nazi salute.
What matters is what happens afterwards. If my attempted Klingon salute was actually a Nazi salute I would immediately apologize and explain what happened as soon as someone told me I'd done a Nazi salute.
Only Very Online people were really aware of that, though. Once he progressed from insane ranting on Twitter to, well, that salute, it really became obvious to just about everyone.
Most Brits aren't wealthy, BYD are aggressively priced - as are other Chinese brands like Omoda. New prices for full EV compare pretty favourably to ICE cars from the traditional mid-market brands, the Fords / Volkswagens / Vauxhalls.
It doesn't help that full EVs are still at a kind of progressive-status-symbol stage of the adoption curve - the people who buy them are exactly the same people who'll see all the Nazi crap and be put off by it.
Here too, in NZ, after his salute was the first time I've heard him mentioned in the non technical circle I'm part of. Although it's a group that wouldn't even think about a Tesla. Not because they're anti EV or anything, they just don't have much money.
As a German, it's both. The blatant power grab made him very unpopular anyway (though he was already seen as a person of low character by most who read about the cave diver who he falsely accused of being a pedophile [0]).
However, the Nazi salute was plainly absurd, and elicited a much more emotional response. I know that on this site there are many who defend him in this instance, either because they think "Germans should get over their guilt", or because they have fallen for picture comparisons with other politicians instead of looking at the videos [1].
The latter is just people falling for propaganda, nothing too interesting there. The former is of course a tempting viewpoint for those who have not had the same education about the holocaust that the average German receives, and looks in from the outside without understanding that it's not "guilt", or even a unique German burden that we put on ourselves. Instead, many of us (myself included) believe that it's the duty of all people, not just Germans, to make sure fascism doesn't rise again. We don't have a bigger duty, we just have more knowledge about it on average, so many of us tend to care more.
Sorry about the long diatribe here, I just wanted to get that out of the way because it always seems to come up anyway (and in fact did in another thread I read just minutes ago).
As I understand it the salute was a calculated move to prevent a split of the MAGA crowd between the H1B-immigration-push top-hats and the no-immigrants-anywhere bottom-crowd. Nothing like a large gesture to distract the plebs both in and out of the echo-bubble. And the fact that there so many occurences of the number 88 in Tesla's prices, test-speeds, anywhere an arbitrary two-digit value can be inserted, well, it's plausibly deniable right?
> The former is of course a tempting viewpoint for those who have not had the same education about the holocaust that the average German receives, and looks in from the outside without understanding that it's not "guilt", or even a unique German burden that we put on ourselves.
He did raise a valid point that has been raised before, that is actually widely known, and that is specifically German, and it has little to do with "make sure fascism doesn't rise again". It's just that because he said it it is spun like crazy.
You can call it guilt, you can call it castration (and there is a bit of both), you can call it moving from one extreme to another (and I think your "we don't have a bigger duty" is somewhat illustrative), you can call it what you want, but it is true that the spectre of WWII and of the Nazi period has a huge influence to this day in Germany and not necessarily for the better (from a German POV). It shows, for example in how meek Germany is with using its military, or in their immigration policy, most 'infamously' Merkel's open door policy in 2015 (which has spectacularly backfired since), etc.
It's worth highlighting that guilt is not the same as rememberance.
There are no fundamentals justifying the insane valuation of Tesla. Without the Elon myth (real or imagined) of future returns, the stock price would lose 80-90% of its value. Shareholders are incentivized to not speak up, for now.
If the company became unprofitable to the point of possible bankruptcy, that's a different story.
The issue is that Tesla actually _could_ dominate the American market and several others. They have some quality issues and a big personality issue but if they ditched those and had an iconoclast who wasn't ... an autistic Nazi... at the helm Tesla could be Apple. They have a great product that is hampered by some failures (the personality of their leader, the failure of self-driving, the sizable minority of lemons they put on the sales floor).
But like, Tesla almost has the best car available on the market anywhere. Almost.
They could wipe the floor of any of the existing incumbents. Could.
Doesn't matter to the point at hand. Tesla has a bigger market cap than every other automaker _combined_. Tesla is bigger than the entire auto industry.
There is some justification for that number, based on the theory that Tesla is an energy and AI company with a side hustle in automobiles. But that is pure conjecture that only receives market support because Elon is at the helm.
As a counterpoint, there are several sophisticated investors and large funds holding substantial Tesla positions. I guess their hypothesis is that meme stocks will meme, markets can stay irrational longer than you can afford to stay on the fence.
Yep, the stock price didn't double immediately following the election because Trump is going to help Elon make better EVs. It's purely about the massive grift and corruption that investors expect Elon to capture.
They've been propped up on the whole "retail trader" "HODL" ecosystem, bolstered by the promise of FSD/Autopilot/Robotaxies making every other car company obsolete.
At some point, that facade is going to collapse. Every time I point this out, I get jumped by a bunch of Tesla fanboys, $TSLA holders and the usual associated crowd.
So, I'm going to list some major problems with Tesla, in brief summaries of no particular order
1) FSD is a half truth. I am genuinely impressed with the progress they've made and I think Tesla is one of the leaders in the field. HOWEVER: their approach to risk (laying it on the owners), their lack of robotaxi operations center, and even the hardware in the vehicles not being capable for true FSD and remote monitoring, means that all Tesla vehicles on the road today will NEVER be FSD/RoboTaxi capable without: major hardware upgrades (expensive per vehicle), substantial backend upgrades for live support (time consuming), and serious hiring of live support (they've gotten started but this will completely change the math on OpEx). [0]
2) They have huge risk around new battery technologies. This has become a global race. If someone (such as Toyota) introduces a genuine leapfrog (which they seem to be conservatively teasing in the usual Japanese way with solid state batteries), then Tesla is in some serious shit. Tesla's investing heavily in R&D, so I think they're probably not screwed on this point, but it will be a major point of contention for them in the near future.
3) Public opinion: Elon has decided to make himself the Conservative of the Year. I, personally am not a conservative, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that he's polarizing the addressable market for a mass market consumer product. This is increasingly true outside of the US.
4) Upper limits of addressable markets, pending infra: charging infra is getting better, but the simple fact is that they're reaching the point of diminishing returns. The end goal is probably something like be an L2 charger (ideally better) at every parking meter and a farm of them in every WalMart parking lot. Much progress is being made, but it will still be many years before it's where electric cars are feasible for - let's say - 80% of the US domestic market. NACS went a long way in alleviating this.
5) Competition from China: China is deeply incentivized by market forces to build electric cars (they do not have domestic oil). Their domestic market is huge and economies of scale kick in even for relatively niche products. They are already eating at the low end of the electric car market. They are also hungry and see designing beautiful and good things as a matter of national pride[1].
[0] While we're at it, Alphabet has invested heavily in companies doing 5g rollouts - which is a requirement for a RoboTaxi in my opinion. Elon seems to be short sighted in his apparent belief that 5g isn't needed, nor a vision hw update, and they can really build a 0-intervention RoboTaxi. Don't get me started on his refusal to include LIDAR. I wish him the best of luck.
[1] I have a lot of complaints about how China and Chinese industry operates, at a moral level. But one must also recognize that as they're late to the table, they are at a disadvantage and they know it. A lot of the things they do that offend and disgruntle western tech people - especially around IP - are frankly, perfectly rational (even if I personally don't like it). The DeepSeek leader Liang Wenfeng put his attitude around China's behavior in a very refreshing manor, which really humanizes a group of people that many like to denigrate:
We believe that with economic development, China must gradually transition from being a beneficiary to a contributor, rather than continuing to ride on the coattails of others. Over the past 30 years of the IT revolution, we barely participated in core tech innovation.We’ve grown accustomed to Moore’s Law “falling fr...
The problem is the question itself - the only acceptable FSD is the one I don't have to do any interventions. My mind can wander, I can read a book or watch a movie, or sleep. Only thing I am willing to actually pay for.
Anything less is adaptive cruise control + lane assist (keep & change), no matter how fancy the marketing wrapping on it. "Safety-critical interventions" WTF is that, car trying to kill you and your family and you fighting its bad decisions and for now winning over? The amount they would have to pay me for such alpha-testing to ever drive such vehicle is non-trivial even for tesla.
I don't have to do any interventions on my daily commute and haven't for about six months now. It's a better driver than I am, and has saved the life of a bicyclist that I and another car didn't see (bicycling dressed in black at night).
Do you realize that you are exactly who I’m talking about? One only need to view the many videos on YouTube of ridiculous FSD interventions
Yes, I’m aware it’s supposed to be monitored.
Btw I love the implication in your line of questioning that I haven’t experienced fsd by demanding I give my own personal anecdotes
So here’s three! The last time I experienced FSD was during the December 2024 free trial (12.5 I believe). On one trip, it unsafely botched a merge on Market Street in San Francsico by the Castro (ran out of room and faulted ) Actually, we tried that route because a few years ago, we’d had it completely fuck up by trying to navigate the wrong way down the road. So I supposed that’s an improvement.
Later that week, FSD kept having trouble with a freeway off-ramp around San Mateo and when we did a go around, it tried to pull us into a dedicated bus lane. Well, it did pull through and get to the destination.
And lastly, it consistently manages to navigate into my parking garage and then immediately drive out the other exit.
So there’s your anecdotes. At least we didn’t slam head on into a lamp post.
I'm who you're talking about? I don't believe that you know me.
Anyway, I can only say that I've had an impressively good experience with FSD, which I have put a lot of hours into. But I have noticed the same problem that you have with bus lanes. I disable it when I enter parking garages.
> Every time I point this out, I get jumped by a bunch of Tesla fanboys, $TSLA holders and the usual associated crowd.
You have no basis to accuse me of any of that based on my single question to you. I disagree with you. I politely asked for your personal experience, which differs somewhat from mine. You are being rude.
You’re making my point for me and don’t even realize it. Your anecdotes are worthless and your belief that people couldn’t possibly know what they’re talking about if they havent tried it is ridiculous.
You get the amount of courtesy from me that you deserve.
He is not "conservative of the year". He gave a speech to the far right AfD Party in Germany and called them Germanies only hope.
To give you an idea: at the European level, the group of LePen and Meloni refuses to work with them because they are to extreme. Many regional branches of AfD are under surveillance for strong suspicion of fascist activities. One of their most prominent politicians sued someone for defamation for calling him fascist. The court decided that this was not defamatory because it was in fact true.
Our conservatives are so far refusing to cooperate at all with the AfD.
So Musk is not "conservative of the year" he is a supporter of certified fascists.
You're right. But sadly, The US only has two parties and we more or less draw a line on Progressive (Democrat) and Conservative (Republican). Meanwhile, in reality both of US parties would probably fall Center-Right compared to EU parties.
But lately people have been more blatantly making a MAGA distinction from Republicans and MAGA is pretty much your AfD party in a nutshell. Except they are running the show in America for at least 2 more years.
> We believe that with economic development, China must gradually transition from being a beneficiary to a contributor,
You say that in future tense. But we also now believe that steep tariffs on Chinese cars are necessary lest they "contribute" too much, too advanced, too cheaply and destroy domestic industries that can't keep up any more.
The EU, and current and previous US administrations believe this.
> new battery technologies. This has become a global race.
"Global" ? One country is far ahead here and again it's China e.g.:
Ah right. Interesting that this is the view of a Chinese technologist working in China.
And also that seems be aimed more at DeepSeek's LLM software and the tech business, than it is at electric vehicles. The second technology is IMHO far more beneficial.
There are no fundamentals justifying valuations of most multi-trillion dollar US companies, and yet here we are. Also, Tesla is currently the only US company that figured out how to make EVs profitably. And one of the very few in the world. All the remaining companies able to profitably make EVs are in China, which we for some reason must "contain" somehow.
Toyota could probably make a profitable EV by just taking their Prius and RAV4 PHEVs and omitting the ICE engine and using that space for more batteries, replacing the charger with one that can handle higher power, and tweaking the software.
>Also, Tesla is currently the only US company that figured out how to make EVs profitably.
That's not really true these days and hence part of the grift. Early Tesla was only profitable because they were first to market and had huge subsidies to take advantadge of. It's no coincidence that Musk started moving right as Trump took his first office and was clearly antagonizing EV tax credits (as he does now).
Meanwhile, in the 2020's TSLA isn't profitable from cars. It's from BTC and some weird loophole I don't fully understand letting them amortize that value for multiple years.
Citation needed. In 2024 Tesla reported average margins of about 20%, excluding all that. I get it, you don't like Musk, but let's not get carried away here.
Nothing I said was really opinion here. How about you cite how they excluded the crypto and got 20% profit margins if you're going to simply ask for sources and call me biased? I don't exactly trust Hollywood accounting knowing the above story.
You're trying to weasel out of this, which I will not allow. I specifically said that they make profit in their car business _even excluding_ all the other things. They do carry forward prior losses, of course, of which they had a massive amount, and reduce their tax obligations to near zero with them, but they are profitably building EVs. Why? Because they are vertically integrated, and they also build their own batteries, like e.g. BYD.
I was wondering how this compares, the car lobby ADAC [0] has Jan '24 22,474 vs Jan '25 34,498 for new EVs (so 50% more), Jan '24 was apparently a particularly bad month as the subsidies for EVs had just ended, looking at some other stats, Jan '24 was the worst EV month since Jan '23.
"German road traffic agency KBA’s website on Wednesday showed the number of newly registered Tesla cars fell 59.5% to 1,277 in January, while the overall German market was down just 2.8% at slightly more than 207,000 vehicles during the month."
Didn't verify it personally, but if you claim something contrary to TFA, a source would be nice.
Comparing different months doesn't mean as much due to seasonal trends. YoY numbers from 1/2024 is aroound 215k. sp a 2.8% YoY decline seems to make sense.
The overall slump in electric car sales in Germany saw battery-powered vehicles lose market share relative to traditional combustion engines and hybrid cars. Electric cars made up 13.5 percent of sales in 2024, down from 18.4 percent in the previous year.6 Jan 2025
I don't think it actually happens as much as these people like to say it does. It's just a convenient way to externally blame and berate those they don't like for things they were going to do anyway.
But to the extent that it does happen, it seems explicable with reference to the behaviour of children when told not to do something. Some evidently never grew out of it.
I'm not sure how effective it is, but I have heard of the concept of "rage spending". buying a product with the intent to enrage social or political opponents.
The idea makes sense, but these days people make it so blatant. So the merchant can make it feel more like a grift than simply trying to appeal to an audience.
His new "target" audience is mostly the prussian-rump-state that has been left behind in east germany, that yearns for a new "empire" similar to the russians. Funny though, the time of empires is the one where "hyper-trade" dependant germany was the most run-down it ever was. You do not jump other countries in a dark alley with 1 month of gasoline for tanks if things are going so well.
A lot of this was down to the huge sales of the Model Y in Europe in the past year or two with subsidized loans at rock bottom rates. The lowest I saw was 0%. Obviously today that's no longer the case. Also the MY is due to be replaced so a lot of would be Tesla buyers are holding off. But I don't doubt that some part, perhaps even a large part, of this is down to personality.
So it'll be interesting to see what happens when the new Model Y is launched and how much they retake of this lost market share. My guess is, some, but not nearly all of it. People held their noses and bought the Tesla when they were at a huge (interest rate) discount. Tesla obviously can't give people long sub 1% loans and make a profit in 2025.
For me personally (in Europe, looking for a new EV this year) I'd be happy to pay more north of a $10k premium to not have the car that says Tesla on it.
Not at all, its all self-inflicted. He keeps insulting most of Europe, continuously, like a rich spoiled kid for literally no gain on his part, ego is too big to have any control over it and his mental instabilities don't help.
If you can respect such a man and even give him your money thats you, but many folks don't. Colleagues who own Tesla now regret buying it, literally putting those meme stickers 'I bought this car before elon went fascist'. Right leaning all of them.
Its not about left-leaning, no need to spin it that way, he managed to insult literally whole spectrum of people in Europe apart from neonazis. Not many of those buying teslas as one can imagine.
He's been attacking European regulators, but not Europeans per se.
He has business related objections to the Digital Services Act, and broader ideological objections about Europe's culture of regulation over innovation and blames that culture for Europe's stagnant economic growth.
Yeah, I think in general what he has said is true but also touches a nerve (because it is political so obviously it is polarizing, and because it is a foreign saying it, which tends to irk people anywhere irrespective of what is being said).
No, it's because it's not true, we actually like the things because they make life better for regular people, and not just the rich who exploit them. Universal healthcare, social welfare, consumer protection, environmental regulations. It's not a foreigner saying it, it's a clueless outsider who wants to get rid of protections for others he doesn't need to make more profit. That touches a nerve because hands off. We SEE the countries that have no regulations and we don't give a fuck about their total size of the economy. Thanks, but no thanks. We saw the sheer brain worms that lead to Brexit, too.
If the EU is so terrible why not leave us alone instead of trying to subvert us? Let us live in squalor and do your super shiny mega success stuff that works so well for you.
> Universal healthcare, social welfare, consumer protection, environmental regulations.
This is a strawman. Musk isn't attacking these things.
What he is attacking is excessive regulations imposed on new technology, often pre-emptively or without significant demonstrable harm. Regulations that aren't solving any real world problem but exist for political reasons. To allow politicians to message "we'll protect you from the Americans" and to allow regulators to continue having a reason to be employed.
He isn't a big picture thinker, he's not even a thinker. Show me a coherent "big picture" thought of his. Or I could show you many things he thinks are very deep any moderately bright teenager would be ashamed to claim.
And he acts the opposite as you describe. His factory is causing problems because he didn't even think about where to get the water from.
No one asked for his assistance. No one accepted it. At that point it isn't assistance, it's pestering. Maybe even harassment depending on how long it occurs
And every time I have heard him talk it was just a gish gallop, not to mention the utterly idiotic (and false) stuff he boosts on Twitter. I haven't even seen anything that would lead me to believe he could seriously think about these things, not to mention showing any evidence he ever did.
> “Regulations, basically, should be default gone,” Musk said. “Not default there, default gone. And if it turns out that we missed the mark on a regulation, we can always add it back in.”
> we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation
Zero regulations is an asinine position. The vast bulk of regulations that were added over the past hundred years were in response to demonstrable harms. If someone wants to get rid of an existing regulation, it is up to them to show why it is no longer needed.
What he said about regulation in the EU is so outrageous that this is the EU Commission's plan for the next 5 years:
"we will radically lighten the regulatory load for people, businesses and administrations in the EU. To boost prosperity and resilience, the Commission will propose unprecedented simplification to unleash opportunities, innovation and growth." [1] (Published this very morning!)
I doubt that includes no longer wanting to look into X and election interference, which Musk probably counts as one of those more pesky regulations, while with the other side of his mouth talking about transparency. No, DOGE would be more like, say, pointing at the title of a project from 20 years ago and go "woke! I don't know what this is! far leftist! wasteful!" while persecuting anyone who looked into fishy things about Tesla and SpaceX, kinda like Trump fired FBI agents who investigated Jan 6th.
We don't do that here. That's banana republic stuff. If private security barred politicians while some script kiddies rifle just copy private records, while some dude talked about getting rid of the Department of Education, there'd be a whole other state of emergency in most countries in Europe, certainly in Germany.
For example he kept criticizing EU's illegal immigration and online speech censorship practices.
And he's right about these two very valid issues though, but self righteous EU liberals will treat this as insults and instead point to some other crazy stuff Elon does and says as a way to control the narrative and invalidate the correct issues he's pointing out through this use of emotional manipulation.
He wasn't criticizing illegal immigration, but immigration full stop. And his solution is supporting Nazis that want to do away with democracy.
Also, the way he just makes shit up constantly, he doesn't get to talk about censorship as if that's something he has in him to care about. Lying and censoring are two sides of the same coin.
He just wants to undermine "legacy media" because the cess pool that is X is "the town square" in his mind, and anyone who isn't in it doesn't get a say anyway.
>He wasn't criticizing illegal immigration, but immigration full stop.
Source? All I saw were comments on illegal migration.
>Lying and censoring are two sides of the same coin.
False. Lying is exercising your right to free speech, politicians do it constantly with little to no consequences yet Musk is the problem when he does it? Censoring speech is oppression on free speech and a one way street to a dictatorship.
>He just wants to undermine "legacy media"
Ah yes, the famous legacy media that "never" lies to you and is owned by the "other" billionaires like Rupert Murdoch that are somehow better than the Musk billionaire because reasons? Do you realize how biased and shallow your arguments are?
> Source? All I saw were comments on illegal migration.
No, you are correct, how I worded it "him criticizing it", is flat out wrong. The thought was that he supports the AfD who are lying through their teeth about it, and while I can elaborate on that, it would be with mostly German source material because I don't know or care what of that is described how by English speakers.
> > Lying and censoring are two sides of the same coin.
> False. Lying is exercising your right to free speech, politicians do it constantly with little to no consequences yet Musk is the problem when he does it?
It's also the other side of the same coin when politicians do it. You just said "false" followed by a question that makes no sense. The objective is to distort the truth and deceive in both cases. You can do that by taking something away, or a part of it, or adding to it, or changing something. And they usually come hand in hand. To tell a lie, you have to hide the truth, to hide the truth, you have to tell a (white) lie.
> ah yes, the famous legacy media that "never" lies to you [..] Do you realize how biased and shallow your arguments are?
You wrote an entire word salad that doesn't disprove my points and criticism of your arguments. No counter arguments, no counter examples, just accusations. I'll end my conversation with you here.
> He wasn't criticizing illegal immigration, but immigration full stop
For someone criticising Musk for dishonesty, you may want to look in the mirror.
Musk is supportive of legal migration, and wants countries to increase the legal migration rates. He opposes illegal migration, as does the vast majority of the public.
Well, the German AfD, which Musk calls Germany's "only hope", may pay lip service about illegal immigration, but really means Deutschland für Deutsche. They're eating more chalk but you're not gonna tell Germans who pay attention they don't know what they know. Not gonna happen.
> Discussion now turns to the practical details, the steps that need to be taken. Mörig wants to select a committee of experts to fine tune the details of this plan for mass deportations. These experts will ensure the masterplan is executed “ethically, legally, and efficiently”, so that the racially motivated forced displacement of people has the guise of a legal migration policy.
As you say, most people agree that illegal immigration isn't okay, and furthermore, that integration in Germany is an issue. The AfD wants to use that to enact things that are way worse than what they use as an excuse, kinda like Trump is doing in the US now.
There is nothing wrong with criticizing immigration. In fact this is one of the biggest issues in Europe and, surely, in a democracy people should be able to discuss issues freely.
Well, there usually is. It's weird and backwards and the people who want no immigration at all are a much bigger drain on our society than immigrants.
> There is nothing wrong with criticizing immigration.
They had member droning on about putting journalists and homosexuals in mass graves, one dancing on the Holocaust memorial, condoning setting refugee homes on fire etc. hundreds such things, one worse than the other.
They're not even patriots, they do nothing but obstruct and destroy and blame immigrants for it. They barely speak German, they speak no second language, they have nothing but resentment, conspiracy theories, scapegoats and "identity". Their neoliberal economic policy goes squarely against the interests of the voters they rile up with blaming immigrants on the money that cut for tax cuts for the rich.
> surely, in a democracy people should be able to discuss issues freely.
The biggest issue in Europe remains denazification. We can discuss ANYTHING with non-Nazis, NOTHING with Nazis.
And no, we don't owe tolerance to Nazis. We owe them trials.
> We go into the Reichstag to stock up on our own weapons in the arsenal of democracy with its own weapons. We become Reichstag deputies to paralyze the Weimar mindset with their own support. If democracy is so stupid as to give us to give us free tickets and allowances for this disservice, that is their own business. Every legal means is at our disposal to revolutionize the state of today.
> If we succeed in getting 60 or 70 agitators and organizers of our party and organizers of our party in the various parliaments the state itself will be able to equip our fighting apparatus and pay for our fighting apparatus. A matter that is attractive and teasing enough to give it a try...
> We are not coming as friends, nor as neutrals. We come as enemies! Like the wolf breaking into the flock of sheep, so we come!
It's not a good idea to spread fake news like this correctiv disinformation:
"At the center of the proceedings is a Tagesschau report that was based on misleading assessments of the Correctiv report. It was falsely claimed that the expulsion of German citizens and the revocation of citizenship based on racist criteria had been discussed at the meeting in Potsdam. This was refuted by affidavits from the participants."
So they didn't have proof, and some participants pinky swore? Cool. And whenever someone gets caught frothing at the mouth over putting people into mass graves and pissing on them or whatever, and other such things that are a constant with the AfD, they leave the party before they get kicked out.
You NEVER heard that shit from the AfD first though, isn't that weird? Like, that someone says such things internally and it causes a ruckus. It's only when non-Nazis catch wind of it and it causes a scandal. Time and time again.
Which is Nazi 101. Which is what they do, until they have enough power and laugh in your face for expecting them to stick to their lip service. We've been there before. All sorts of people have all sorts of experiences with the Nazis and all sorts of ideas, not all of them wrong, but this is ground zero. They live among us, they swim in their sewage of what started as RT-style one sided criticism and by now is just deranged FUD for over a decade now, morphing from what crawled out of the underbrush in the early 90s, they do nothing but block politics -- because they want to "abolish the system", not work together with others in a pluralistic democracy -- and get funded by all sorts of shady sources, a lot of which the subject of criminal investigations.
I never got to know my maternal grandfather because he died in that awful WWII that only fascists and Nazi supported, so as an EU citizen, anyone even remotely endorsing those rotten ideals and neo nazi groups, which I consider a lot more than a simple insult, gets neither money nor respect from me.
I don't know about europe but I follow the UK as I live there and he says some weird stuff like civil war is inevitable (I'm not sure who's going to fight who) and slagging Starmer. A lot of the info is inaccurate and he seems to get it off far right cranks on xitter.
Amusingly @Inevitablewest who he followed claiming to be a British patriot was recently exposed as "Saurabh Chandrakar, an Indian former fruit juice seller accused of masterminding one of the most high-profile betting frauds in Asia" who isn't a brit and doesn't live here https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14381309/Far-Right-...
> he says some weird stuff like civil war is inevitable
That's not an insult... And while provocative this is not weird. Everyone sees where things are going in the UK and Europe in general and a violent backlash is at least a plausible risk at some point. In fact, he made that comment during riots in the UK...
> and slagging Starmer.
In fairness, everyone does. Starmer is one of the most unpopular PMs in history after only about 6 months in power.
are not very positive. I'm guessing you're not from the UK? If someone started posting "the US is a fascist hell hole" or whatever might you not find it annoying? And it's mostly based on ignorance and not visiting the country.
And just for the record it's not a police state and the justice system is not like the second tweet. I mean you can say what you like but it may put people off buying the cars.
by the way re
>In fact, he made that comment during riots in the UK...
The riots were to a large extent set off by bullshit from Twitter/Musk - they put out that three girls had been murdered by an asylum seeker so a bunch of people went to riot at the asylum centers but it turned out to be basically false as the murder was UK born.
I started with a genuine question, which has strangely been downvoted, and the many replies went in all directions except providing an actual reply...
Regarding "the UK has become a police state" so if I understand when privacy groups say it HN agrees but when Musk says it it is unhinged and fascist... right. Now, I don't agree with the claim but how it is received is telling...
> they put out that three girls had been murdered by an asylum seeke
Which should show you that Musk had a point! That is exactly symptomatic of how things are going in a worrying direction in Europe regarding immigration. The issue is that people don't want to see and certainly not when Musk is telling them because that would be "far right " or "fascist"...
The cover-up of grooming gangs is a national scandal and the government finally announced an inquiry into the matter after he did that. So that created pressure on the government for the better.
if there really is organized mass corruption then it could be an “ adversarial deep state campaign”. The claims of wrongdoing are so severe that they need to start providing the evidence publicly asap and file some charges.
I honestly don’t know what to think yet but I agree with you the level of vitriol and unhinged comments is at extreme levels and even here on HN. That said he is intentionally trying to mass trigger as many people as possible likely strategically for a reason we can’t see yet.
Suggesting that the deep state are behind online outrage at Elon while also claiming Elon is intentionally enraging people for unknown strategic reasons is a great summary of the current political moment.
You're right about Reddit. It has become hysterical since the election. If you want an example of what left-wing conspiracy theories look like, just spend some time in the default subreddits.
That said, I doubt Musk's politics have had much of a positive or negative effect on Tesla's sales. There's been a significant increase in competition at the same time as many European countries are entering recessions. That's going to be a much bigger factor.
Certified by agencies of the left extremist government which treats the justification as classified information.
Moreover, one of these agencies is run by a left-wing comrade who is a qualified social education worker. However, the agency should actually be headed by a lawyer, as in the Thuringian law, which was simply reinterpreted in the case of Stephan J. Kramer.
Their policies are mainstream right wing policies, like favouring legal migration over illegal migration.
If you care about intellectual honesty, understand that the "fascism" label applied to AFD (or Trump, Musk et al) is inaccurate and inappropriate. It's the left throwing whatever mud they can hoping some will stick.
No one favors illegal migration over legal, that's just a smear and misrepresentation of the situation.
Meanwhile AfD act like actual neo-Nazis:
"In January 2024, it was revealed that senior members of the party, including Roland Hartwig, then advisor to party co-leader Alice Weidel, attended a meeting alongside neo-Nazi influencers, where plans for the deportation of millions of "asylum seekers", "non-assimilated people", and those with "non-German backgrounds" were discussed, including those with German citizenship and residency rights.[348] The event triggered the 2024 German anti-extremism protests. "
I’m sure the powers that be at HN will be along shortly to lock/remove/censor any article/discussion that doesn’t show enough deference to Musk, as seems to be the new custom.
It takes them awhile sometimes, but they’ll get here.
That's due to Elon's weird sycophants flagging such articles, not admin action.
(If this website were actually important, this would be a pretty significant vulnerability; it's fairly trivial to suppress the visibility of any given article with really quite a small number of people.)
They don’t love Jews, they hate Muslims (and Gypsies and Blacks and Albanians and and and…).
Antisemitism is not a prerequisite for fascism - wanting to have a different religious group put in camps is not the slam dunk differentiator you think it is.
Nazis were interested in that, and fascism is a bigger category. AfD supports fascist regimes like Russia. A small good thing doesn't cancel out huge negative thing.
>Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.
Nazis were not the only type of fascism in history. Simply the most infamous one.
The same politican sued protesters calling him fascist for libel, and lost. The court ruled that there were sufficient factual grounds to justify using the label.
Many of them have sued for defamation over being called a nazi and lost because the court ruled that the alleged defamatory statements are true and as such not defamation.
Fair. Though I'd rather say "confirmed" than "certified". Also it depends which court ruled that: I'm sure a Russian court would rule that there's a significant number of nazis in Ukraine.
And I'm surprised a nazi would sue for defamation: I'd guess most nazis wouldn't.
I'd trust that more than a Russian court for sure.
Though having seen the enormous German self-flagellation about Nazism and WWII, I wouldn't be surprised if their courts overcompensated somewhat in the other direction...
> For every person who won't buy a Tesla because they disagree with Elon's political views, there is a person who would buy a Tesla because they do agree.
"Yes, making Nazi salutes is good actually" is a _rather niche position_ in most of Europe (particularly in wealthy countries); even _actual neo-Nazis_ sometimes shy away from the imagery a bit.
For example not every Trump supporter walks around with a MAGA hat. It's one thing to anonymously vote for Trump, it's another to make it public and deal with all the social backlash.
The richest person in the world, who makes enough for 10 lifetimes every day off of interest bought his way into government and immediately cut funding to people starving around the world. He is trying to get rid of the department of education, OSHA, the EPA, the FDIC, banking regulations and the people investigating his aiding of russia with starlink.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
― George Orwell, 1984
The entire world knows it is a nazi salute, and people defending it do too.
This isn't "his political views", this are evil actions, it is indefensible. The person who has everything wants to take more from the people who have nothing.
There's also been a significant increase in competition. BYD are competing agressively across the continent, backed by Chinese subsidies, and European automakers are increasing their EV offings. For example, Volvo went from having 1 EV to 6 EV models available.
Also keep in mind that many European countries entered a recession over the past year. Also keep in mind that the cost of electricity has tripled since Putin attacked Ukraine.
The partisan types will ascribe Tesla's sales fall to Musk's politics, but I suspect that's actually a small effect compared to some of the broader market dynamics.
> Tesla obviously can't give people long sub 1% loans and make a profit in 2025.
I think this is not the right way to look at it. Essentially, Tesla sells the car for a price that is higher than the sum of all the input costs (the margin). Say this margin is around $10k per car. If the factories have more inventory, they could give customers a $5k discount, but they could also sell it for the full price but give a sub 1% loan. They probably loan that money for about 3 to 5%. So they only take a hit of a few procent for 2 years meaning $60k * 0.04 * 0.04 = $4800. My point is that a low percentage loan is essentially the same as discount on the purchase price.
Do these continues price decreases mean that things look dire? Based on solely this information, not necessarily. Battery costs are a large part of the cost of the car, and battery costs are consistently coming down. This saves a few thousand dollars per year. So I expect prices to come down each year. That fact alone is not a problem.
Having said that, we know that Tesla's margins have consistently come down for the last 3 years, and we know that Chinese cars become more competitive each year. So things aren't looking great. But again, price declines are expected and not necessarily a problem. I would say market share is the most important metric to look at.
Yeah I’m aware the interest rebate is just a rebate like any other but the cost of such rebates is much higher if the baseline interest is 4% than if it’s 1%. The difference between 0% and 2% is as expensive as the subsidy between 7% and 5% but I don’t think it will sway as many customers
I honestly think a key ceo skill in this day and age is managing to side step every single culture war issue, and unhelpfully for Tesla, Elon seems to disagree with me (though clearly working out for him personally)
Well, I don't think most folks could name a CEO of another car company. So they seem to be doing fine in that category, but maybe not gaining any marketing advantage? I guess a great trick would be for a CEO to have a large social media presence but still side step culture war issues?
Yep look at Sundar Pachai or Tim Cook, they just always go with the flow, that's the way I prefer my CEOs when I invest in corps. It's up to a democracy to fix itself, not corporations. I don't need culture wars in corporations, those need to happen at the voting booths, Washington DC, and protests.
According to the more detailed data for January 2025, published by the Kraftfahr-Bundesamt:
Model 3 272
Model S 13
Model X 13
Model Y 979
∑ 1277
For comparison the data for January 2024:
Model 3 695
Model S 31
Model X 33
Model Y 2393
∑ 3152
Model Y in both Januaries is still a multiple of ~ 3.5 of the Model 3.
Your theory, that people were waiting for the MY refresh doesn’t seem likely. According to my experience most people aren’t as much informed of the inside baseball when a new model arrives. Nerd stuff.
Somewhat anecdotal, but I follow the used Tesla Model 3 market fairly closely in western Canada and have seen the number of listings triple over the last month or so.
Maybe Germans don't want to buy cars from the company whose CEO did not one but two Nazi salutes on national television.
As a Tesla owner myself, it makes me very uncomfortable to think my car is remotely associated with a hate group. I wouldn't buy one today nor do I recommend it to others.
Know way of testing this (that I know at least), but I'm curious about how much the effect is Musk's politics and how much is other EVs catching up.
Politically, I'm fairly left wing, concerned about democracy and climate change. Elon Musk's politics is easily enough to make sure I'd never purchase anything he's associated with.
That said, for buying an EV, tradional car manufacturers have mostly caught up with where Tesla is now, as a European buyer, I could get a high quality EV much cheaper from longer established brands with more effecient supply chains.
Seems pretty tricky to try and untangle those two effects.
What people seem to miss in this discussion: Many Germans get EV cars as company cars because of how they're taxed:
Say the car is worth 60k and you're allowed to use it for non-work purposes, then you need to tax 1% of the list price per month (i.e. 600 is added as fictional income to your monthly pay, and you need to pay the tax on that) IF you drive a gas / diesel car.
For EVs that is 0.25%, so there was a huge incentive for people to get Teslas.
That law is changing though: The taxation applies only to cars up to €60k list price (most Teslas exceed that by now, even Model 3s with some extras), and as electricity prices have been soaring, charging the EV got really expensive.
Adding to that, interest rates have been increasing in 2022 for the first time in a long time. This means that leasing rates and financing rates skyrocketed. So as another commenter wrote: Buying a new car is one of the least worries of Germans at the moment.
I agree. But: I wonder how long ago his fascination with all things Nazi started and the whole 'X' thing goes back a long, long time. So this may not be a recent thing at all.
His maternal grandfather was an ardent supporter of nazi ideals, boosted the Protocols of Zion, and moved to the aparthied South African regime as they had "the right idea". His paternal grandfather was less so but leaned that way and was foreign minister in the SA Government defending aparthied.
Elon's maternal grandfather died when he was young but apparently his maternal grandmother had a great influence on him and was likely a fellow traveller living in a house that celebrated all things Nazi.
I have anecdotal evidence that at least a part of this is due to Musk's behaviour. My father is in charge of the car fleet for a large German company, and they have decided to exclude Tesla from their fleet because of Musk's recent behaviour. At the same time, they have also decided to go full electric for the entire fleet (no hybrid either).
Wouldn't it be anecdotal information and not evidence? I always consider those two words together as an oxymoron. I have an educated guess keeping up with European news that it's highly likely Musk's recent attempts to control German politics would be highly frowned upon by anyone not from the AfD party.
evidence is used to support a statement. Information is a more broad term. Information can be evidence, but not always. Meanwhile, almost all evidence can be categorized as information.
I can't tell for the parent commenter but German society is more concerned about him embracing the extremist right in Germany and offering a lot support for free to them in the current campaign.
There's no way it's not a factor. 12 months ago I hated Musk but it would only have had a limited impact on my car choice, I'd still definitely look at Teslas as an option.
Now he's taken over a foreign government to pursue overly fascist goals, being seen in public in a new Tesla is just not something I can consider.
Doing this in Germany would be even more inconceivable.
Its based on the discussion it generates. If it generates heated discussions with little thoughtfulness or curiosity, it gets flagged and removed. Its effectively the opposite of how Facebook / Reddit / similar clickbait platforms work, and one of the key reasons we don't get as much low quality garbage comments here.
cloverich described the theory. In practice, if enough people loosely band together to flag, they can mark an entire story as flagged. As of late, almost every topic related to Elon Musk became flagged, so I wouldn't be shocked if there's a more dedicated brigade for this (as well as a mix of the usual "I don't want politics in Hacker News" crowd).
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 167 ms ] threadHowever, the number of times I heard comments like »I don’t want to worry about my car not starting if Musk starts throwing a tantrum« has been quite constant the last couple of months if not years – news about Starlink not working, support layoffs at Twitter, such things. And the target audience of Tesla is people who hear and care about such things.
It’s fictional symbolism that resonated with Italian fascists and eventually became the greeting associated with nazism.
Either it was a real fascist salute, or a Hollywood roman salute. Either one is deeply troubling.
Yes.
So either it was, or Musk is simply not sane. Or both.
(It's both).
He's acting like a NAZI in every relevant way except the symbolic and superficial. (Well... except for that one very public time.)
He's very aggressively and openly supporting far-right parties, including the AfD in Germany.
He's suggested to Germans to get over the shame of their past -- guess what he's referring to here!
He basically owns the US Executive branch in the same way that fascists "integrate" business and politics.
He loves to single out vulnerable minority groups for public vilification (the transgendered), including personally taking steps to materially harm them.
Him and Trump together want to control the racial makeup of the country, and have collaborated on mass arrests and deportations.
Etc...
If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and salutes like a duck...
It's a Nazi salute to everybody except a handful of people who are desperately in denial about it.
I don't see how I've "twisted" words either, unless you consider "stating facts" to be deceptive somehow.
Maybe you have alternative facts?
It will be interesting to see how it unfolds, particularly amongst current Tesla owners, as if that base shrinks the company could be in real trouble.
Edit: To elaborate: I can see that Elon is sometimes being put in a worse light than would be appropriate. Same is true for Trump. I cheekily think they kinda deserve it, but having run a company that was in the media a lot, you do get unfair coverage from the best outlets. I bet Elon does too. I don't know if that was supposed to be a salute or not, and I anyhow couldn't think much worse of him than I did before the Twitter drama. But I also think parent is right that Elon's brand is entirely poisoned in some circles now, where previously he could barely do wrong.
These guys lie about everyone else and go out of their way to put others into worst light that would be appropriate so much ... that this particular complain rings hollow.
Especially when used in the context where their fans are trying to deny something that is available on camera.
> His nazi salute was probably not a nazi salute
That’s it.
These guys loved it: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-mus...
And so does this guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/1i68puj/have_we_l...
Exactly. There actually are reasons one might do a gesture that is nearly identical to a Nazi salute without realizing it. For a while I had mixed up the Nazi salute and some alien salutes (or salutes from alternate dimension humans) from Star Trek.
If for some reason I had found myself addressing a crowd of Trek fans I might have done what I thought was a Klingon or Romulan salute and instead done a Nazi salute.
What matters is what happens afterwards. If my attempted Klingon salute was actually a Nazi salute I would immediately apologize and explain what happened as soon as someone told me I'd done a Nazi salute.
According to [1], 2024 sales by model (2 Teslas on podium, 0 BYD in top 10):
FULL YEAR 2024 - UK EV sales
Tesla Model Y 32,862
Audi Q4 e-tron 17,621
Tesla Model 3 17,425
MG4 15,651
BMW i4 12,953
Mercedes EQA 11,617
Skoda Enyaq 11,516
Hyundai KONA 10,858
Volvo EX30 9,931
Volkswagen ID.4 8,927
This maches my experience of English roads. I must have seen one BYD (driven by a Chinese...) while Teslas are everywhere now.
[1] https://www.electrifying.com/blog/article/official-figures-s...
However, the Nazi salute was plainly absurd, and elicited a much more emotional response. I know that on this site there are many who defend him in this instance, either because they think "Germans should get over their guilt", or because they have fallen for picture comparisons with other politicians instead of looking at the videos [1].
The latter is just people falling for propaganda, nothing too interesting there. The former is of course a tempting viewpoint for those who have not had the same education about the holocaust that the average German receives, and looks in from the outside without understanding that it's not "guilt", or even a unique German burden that we put on ourselves. Instead, many of us (myself included) believe that it's the duty of all people, not just Germans, to make sure fascism doesn't rise again. We don't have a bigger duty, we just have more knowledge about it on average, so many of us tend to care more.
Sorry about the long diatribe here, I just wanted to get that out of the way because it always seems to come up anyway (and in fact did in another thread I read just minutes ago).
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20180719123811/https://www.bbc.c...
[1] https://youtu.be/MXeG_mmXZGE
He did raise a valid point that has been raised before, that is actually widely known, and that is specifically German, and it has little to do with "make sure fascism doesn't rise again". It's just that because he said it it is spun like crazy.
You can call it guilt, you can call it castration (and there is a bit of both), you can call it moving from one extreme to another (and I think your "we don't have a bigger duty" is somewhat illustrative), you can call it what you want, but it is true that the spectre of WWII and of the Nazi period has a huge influence to this day in Germany and not necessarily for the better (from a German POV). It shows, for example in how meek Germany is with using its military, or in their immigration policy, most 'infamously' Merkel's open door policy in 2015 (which has spectacularly backfired since), etc.
It's worth highlighting that guilt is not the same as rememberance.
If the company became unprofitable to the point of possible bankruptcy, that's a different story.
But like, Tesla almost has the best car available on the market anywhere. Almost.
They could wipe the floor of any of the existing incumbents. Could.
There is some justification for that number, based on the theory that Tesla is an energy and AI company with a side hustle in automobiles. But that is pure conjecture that only receives market support because Elon is at the helm.
At some point, that facade is going to collapse. Every time I point this out, I get jumped by a bunch of Tesla fanboys, $TSLA holders and the usual associated crowd.
So, I'm going to list some major problems with Tesla, in brief summaries of no particular order
1) FSD is a half truth. I am genuinely impressed with the progress they've made and I think Tesla is one of the leaders in the field. HOWEVER: their approach to risk (laying it on the owners), their lack of robotaxi operations center, and even the hardware in the vehicles not being capable for true FSD and remote monitoring, means that all Tesla vehicles on the road today will NEVER be FSD/RoboTaxi capable without: major hardware upgrades (expensive per vehicle), substantial backend upgrades for live support (time consuming), and serious hiring of live support (they've gotten started but this will completely change the math on OpEx). [0]
2) They have huge risk around new battery technologies. This has become a global race. If someone (such as Toyota) introduces a genuine leapfrog (which they seem to be conservatively teasing in the usual Japanese way with solid state batteries), then Tesla is in some serious shit. Tesla's investing heavily in R&D, so I think they're probably not screwed on this point, but it will be a major point of contention for them in the near future.
3) Public opinion: Elon has decided to make himself the Conservative of the Year. I, personally am not a conservative, but it doesn't take a genius to realize that he's polarizing the addressable market for a mass market consumer product. This is increasingly true outside of the US.
4) Upper limits of addressable markets, pending infra: charging infra is getting better, but the simple fact is that they're reaching the point of diminishing returns. The end goal is probably something like be an L2 charger (ideally better) at every parking meter and a farm of them in every WalMart parking lot. Much progress is being made, but it will still be many years before it's where electric cars are feasible for - let's say - 80% of the US domestic market. NACS went a long way in alleviating this.
5) Competition from China: China is deeply incentivized by market forces to build electric cars (they do not have domestic oil). Their domestic market is huge and economies of scale kick in even for relatively niche products. They are already eating at the low end of the electric car market. They are also hungry and see designing beautiful and good things as a matter of national pride[1].
[0] While we're at it, Alphabet has invested heavily in companies doing 5g rollouts - which is a requirement for a RoboTaxi in my opinion. Elon seems to be short sighted in his apparent belief that 5g isn't needed, nor a vision hw update, and they can really build a 0-intervention RoboTaxi. Don't get me started on his refusal to include LIDAR. I wish him the best of luck.
[1] I have a lot of complaints about how China and Chinese industry operates, at a moral level. But one must also recognize that as they're late to the table, they are at a disadvantage and they know it. A lot of the things they do that offend and disgruntle western tech people - especially around IP - are frankly, perfectly rational (even if I personally don't like it). The DeepSeek leader Liang Wenfeng put his attitude around China's behavior in a very refreshing manor, which really humanizes a group of people that many like to denigrate:
We believe that with economic development, China must gradually transition from being a beneficiary to a contributor, rather than continuing to ride on the coattails of others. Over the past 30 years of the IT revolution, we barely participated in core tech innovation.We’ve grown accustomed to Moore’s Law “falling fr...
Anything less is adaptive cruise control + lane assist (keep & change), no matter how fancy the marketing wrapping on it. "Safety-critical interventions" WTF is that, car trying to kill you and your family and you fighting its bad decisions and for now winning over? The amount they would have to pay me for such alpha-testing to ever drive such vehicle is non-trivial even for tesla.
Yes, I’m aware it’s supposed to be monitored.
Btw I love the implication in your line of questioning that I haven’t experienced fsd by demanding I give my own personal anecdotes
So here’s three! The last time I experienced FSD was during the December 2024 free trial (12.5 I believe). On one trip, it unsafely botched a merge on Market Street in San Francsico by the Castro (ran out of room and faulted ) Actually, we tried that route because a few years ago, we’d had it completely fuck up by trying to navigate the wrong way down the road. So I supposed that’s an improvement.
Later that week, FSD kept having trouble with a freeway off-ramp around San Mateo and when we did a go around, it tried to pull us into a dedicated bus lane. Well, it did pull through and get to the destination.
And lastly, it consistently manages to navigate into my parking garage and then immediately drive out the other exit.
So there’s your anecdotes. At least we didn’t slam head on into a lamp post.
Anyway, I can only say that I've had an impressively good experience with FSD, which I have put a lot of hours into. But I have noticed the same problem that you have with bus lanes. I disable it when I enter parking garages.
And yet, I described you in my original post :)
> Every time I point this out, I get jumped by a bunch of Tesla fanboys, $TSLA holders and the usual associated crowd.
You have no basis to accuse me of any of that based on my single question to you. I disagree with you. I politely asked for your personal experience, which differs somewhat from mine. You are being rude.
You get the amount of courtesy from me that you deserve.
To give you an idea: at the European level, the group of LePen and Meloni refuses to work with them because they are to extreme. Many regional branches of AfD are under surveillance for strong suspicion of fascist activities. One of their most prominent politicians sued someone for defamation for calling him fascist. The court decided that this was not defamatory because it was in fact true.
Our conservatives are so far refusing to cooperate at all with the AfD.
So Musk is not "conservative of the year" he is a supporter of certified fascists.
While I agree, he seems to be trying for that title with these stunts. And in his mind, he might think that he is succeeding.
(In the US, and to some extent the UK, 'conservative', in political terms, is now usually used to refer to radical far-right policies.)
IMHO, it consists of exactly one proposition.
But lately people have been more blatantly making a MAGA distinction from Republicans and MAGA is pretty much your AfD party in a nutshell. Except they are running the show in America for at least 2 more years.
You say that in future tense. But we also now believe that steep tariffs on Chinese cars are necessary lest they "contribute" too much, too advanced, too cheaply and destroy domestic industries that can't keep up any more.
The EU, and current and previous US administrations believe this.
> new battery technologies. This has become a global race.
"Global" ? One country is far ahead here and again it's China e.g.:
"Can anyone challenge China’s EV battery dominance?" https://www.ft.com/content/1f95d204-ea6a-4cf3-b66a-952362e80...
"Ford Chief Says China Leads US By 10 Years In EV Batteries" https://www.carscoops.com/2025/02/fords-ceo-says-china-is-10...
And yes i have a lot of thoughts about that and it is a substantial danger to tesla
Ah right. Interesting that this is the view of a Chinese technologist working in China.
And also that seems be aimed more at DeepSeek's LLM software and the tech business, than it is at electric vehicles. The second technology is IMHO far more beneficial.
That's not really true these days and hence part of the grift. Early Tesla was only profitable because they were first to market and had huge subsidies to take advantadge of. It's no coincidence that Musk started moving right as Trump took his first office and was clearly antagonizing EV tax credits (as he does now).
Meanwhile, in the 2020's TSLA isn't profitable from cars. It's from BTC and some weird loophole I don't fully understand letting them amortize that value for multiple years.
Nothing I said was really opinion here. How about you cite how they excluded the crypto and got 20% profit margins if you're going to simply ask for sources and call me biased? I don't exactly trust Hollywood accounting knowing the above story.
Tesla fell from 14% of the market to 4% [1]
[0]: https://www.adac.de/news/neuzulassungen-kba/
[1]: https://www.focus.de/auto/elektroauto/starker-start-ins-neue...
https://insideevs.com/news/745119/tesla-sales-europe-2024/
The 2023 to 2024 year-on-year decline was 1% [1]. Compared to that, a 60% drop for a single brand is catastrophic. (And wonderful in this case)
[1] https://www.best-selling-cars.com/germany/2024-full-year-ger...
"German road traffic agency KBA’s website on Wednesday showed the number of newly registered Tesla cars fell 59.5% to 1,277 in January, while the overall German market was down just 2.8% at slightly more than 207,000 vehicles during the month."
Didn't verify it personally, but if you claim something contrary to TFA, a source would be nice.
Electricity prices.
https://www.kba.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/Fahrzeugzula...
https://www.kba.de/DE/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/Fahrzeugzula...
https://fortune.com/2025/01/06/germanys-ev-sales-crash-elect...
The overall slump in electric car sales in Germany saw battery-powered vehicles lose market share relative to traditional combustion engines and hybrid cars. Electric cars made up 13.5 percent of sales in 2024, down from 18.4 percent in the previous year.6 Jan 2025
Suddenly anyone who supports Musk will buy one when they otherwise wouldn't.
But to the extent that it does happen, it seems explicable with reference to the behaviour of children when told not to do something. Some evidently never grew out of it.
The idea makes sense, but these days people make it so blatant. So the merchant can make it feel more like a grift than simply trying to appeal to an audience.
But, honestly, if that is the end result; Trump supporters buying more electric cars, Id call that a win.
So it'll be interesting to see what happens when the new Model Y is launched and how much they retake of this lost market share. My guess is, some, but not nearly all of it. People held their noses and bought the Tesla when they were at a huge (interest rate) discount. Tesla obviously can't give people long sub 1% loans and make a profit in 2025.
For me personally (in Europe, looking for a new EV this year) I'd be happy to pay more north of a $10k premium to not have the car that says Tesla on it.
If you can respect such a man and even give him your money thats you, but many folks don't. Colleagues who own Tesla now regret buying it, literally putting those meme stickers 'I bought this car before elon went fascist'. Right leaning all of them.
Its not about left-leaning, no need to spin it that way, he managed to insult literally whole spectrum of people in Europe apart from neonazis. Not many of those buying teslas as one can imagine.
He has business related objections to the Digital Services Act, and broader ideological objections about Europe's culture of regulation over innovation and blames that culture for Europe's stagnant economic growth.
If the EU is so terrible why not leave us alone instead of trying to subvert us? Let us live in squalor and do your super shiny mega success stuff that works so well for you.
This is a strawman. Musk isn't attacking these things.
What he is attacking is excessive regulations imposed on new technology, often pre-emptively or without significant demonstrable harm. Regulations that aren't solving any real world problem but exist for political reasons. To allow politicians to message "we'll protect you from the Americans" and to allow regulators to continue having a reason to be employed.
They see problems that exist and want to fix them, regardless of whether they are occurring in their own backyard or more broadly.
His companies also employ tens of thousands of people in Europe. 11.500 in Berlin alone, and many multiples of that within the supply chain.
And he acts the opposite as you describe. His factory is causing problems because he didn't even think about where to get the water from.
https://tnfd.global/knowledge-bank/teslas-reliance-on-ground...
And he seems to be just generally attacking all sorts of things he has no clue about, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42996385
And every time I have heard him talk it was just a gish gallop, not to mention the utterly idiotic (and false) stuff he boosts on Twitter. I haven't even seen anything that would lead me to believe he could seriously think about these things, not to mention showing any evidence he ever did.
Otherwise, you're saying the baseline should be to keep regulations even if they aren't needed.
> we’ve just got to do a wholesale, spring cleaning of regulation
"we can always add it back in" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42976708
Regulations should need to justify their existance, they shouldn't just exist by default without a reason.
The US has, for 300 years. I'm sure countries within the EU have an even longer history of that.
>you're saying the baseline should be to keep regulations even if they aren't needed.
No, they already proved their needs. The onus is on the new plantiffs to disprove the needs. No one's done that so far.
"we will radically lighten the regulatory load for people, businesses and administrations in the EU. To boost prosperity and resilience, the Commission will propose unprecedented simplification to unleash opportunities, innovation and growth." [1] (Published this very morning!)
Hmm... DOGEU?
[1] https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-making-process/planning...
We don't do that here. That's banana republic stuff. If private security barred politicians while some script kiddies rifle just copy private records, while some dude talked about getting rid of the Department of Education, there'd be a whole other state of emergency in most countries in Europe, certainly in Germany.
For example he kept criticizing EU's illegal immigration and online speech censorship practices.
And he's right about these two very valid issues though, but self righteous EU liberals will treat this as insults and instead point to some other crazy stuff Elon does and says as a way to control the narrative and invalidate the correct issues he's pointing out through this use of emotional manipulation.
Also, the way he just makes shit up constantly, he doesn't get to talk about censorship as if that's something he has in him to care about. Lying and censoring are two sides of the same coin.
He just wants to undermine "legacy media" because the cess pool that is X is "the town square" in his mind, and anyone who isn't in it doesn't get a say anyway.
Source? All I saw were comments on illegal migration.
>Lying and censoring are two sides of the same coin.
False. Lying is exercising your right to free speech, politicians do it constantly with little to no consequences yet Musk is the problem when he does it? Censoring speech is oppression on free speech and a one way street to a dictatorship.
>He just wants to undermine "legacy media"
Ah yes, the famous legacy media that "never" lies to you and is owned by the "other" billionaires like Rupert Murdoch that are somehow better than the Musk billionaire because reasons? Do you realize how biased and shallow your arguments are?
No, you are correct, how I worded it "him criticizing it", is flat out wrong. The thought was that he supports the AfD who are lying through their teeth about it, and while I can elaborate on that, it would be with mostly German source material because I don't know or care what of that is described how by English speakers.
> > Lying and censoring are two sides of the same coin.
> False. Lying is exercising your right to free speech, politicians do it constantly with little to no consequences yet Musk is the problem when he does it?
It's also the other side of the same coin when politicians do it. You just said "false" followed by a question that makes no sense. The objective is to distort the truth and deceive in both cases. You can do that by taking something away, or a part of it, or adding to it, or changing something. And they usually come hand in hand. To tell a lie, you have to hide the truth, to hide the truth, you have to tell a (white) lie.
> ah yes, the famous legacy media that "never" lies to you [..] Do you realize how biased and shallow your arguments are?
Your straw man isn't my argument.
For someone criticising Musk for dishonesty, you may want to look in the mirror.
Musk is supportive of legal migration, and wants countries to increase the legal migration rates. He opposes illegal migration, as does the vast majority of the public.
https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-...
> Discussion now turns to the practical details, the steps that need to be taken. Mörig wants to select a committee of experts to fine tune the details of this plan for mass deportations. These experts will ensure the masterplan is executed “ethically, legally, and efficiently”, so that the racially motivated forced displacement of people has the guise of a legal migration policy.
As you say, most people agree that illegal immigration isn't okay, and furthermore, that integration in Germany is an issue. The AfD wants to use that to enact things that are way worse than what they use as an excuse, kinda like Trump is doing in the US now.
> There is nothing wrong with criticizing immigration.
They had member droning on about putting journalists and homosexuals in mass graves, one dancing on the Holocaust memorial, condoning setting refugee homes on fire etc. hundreds such things, one worse than the other.
They're not even patriots, they do nothing but obstruct and destroy and blame immigrants for it. They barely speak German, they speak no second language, they have nothing but resentment, conspiracy theories, scapegoats and "identity". Their neoliberal economic policy goes squarely against the interests of the voters they rile up with blaming immigrants on the money that cut for tax cuts for the rich.
> surely, in a democracy people should be able to discuss issues freely.
The biggest issue in Europe remains denazification. We can discuss ANYTHING with non-Nazis, NOTHING with Nazis.
And no, we don't owe tolerance to Nazis. We owe them trials.
> We go into the Reichstag to stock up on our own weapons in the arsenal of democracy with its own weapons. We become Reichstag deputies to paralyze the Weimar mindset with their own support. If democracy is so stupid as to give us to give us free tickets and allowances for this disservice, that is their own business. Every legal means is at our disposal to revolutionize the state of today.
> If we succeed in getting 60 or 70 agitators and organizers of our party and organizers of our party in the various parliaments the state itself will be able to equip our fighting apparatus and pay for our fighting apparatus. A matter that is attractive and teasing enough to give it a try...
> We are not coming as friends, nor as neutrals. We come as enemies! Like the wolf breaking into the flock of sheep, so we come!
-- Joseph Goebbels, 1928
"the state itself will be able to equip our fighting apparatus and pay for our fighting apparatus" is exactly what they discuss at https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-correctiv-recherche-geheimplan-g...
"At the center of the proceedings is a Tagesschau report that was based on misleading assessments of the Correctiv report. It was falsely claimed that the expulsion of German citizens and the revocation of citizenship based on racist criteria had been discussed at the meeting in Potsdam. This was refuted by affidavits from the participants."
https://www.hoecker.eu/news/wer-auf-correctiv-setzt-zahlt-dr...
more details: https://www.tichyseinblick.de/daili-es-sentials/correctiv-ca...
You NEVER heard that shit from the AfD first though, isn't that weird? Like, that someone says such things internally and it causes a ruckus. It's only when non-Nazis catch wind of it and it causes a scandal. Time and time again.
Which is Nazi 101. Which is what they do, until they have enough power and laugh in your face for expecting them to stick to their lip service. We've been there before. All sorts of people have all sorts of experiences with the Nazis and all sorts of ideas, not all of them wrong, but this is ground zero. They live among us, they swim in their sewage of what started as RT-style one sided criticism and by now is just deranged FUD for over a decade now, morphing from what crawled out of the underbrush in the early 90s, they do nothing but block politics -- because they want to "abolish the system", not work together with others in a pluralistic democracy -- and get funded by all sorts of shady sources, a lot of which the subject of criminal investigations.
They are Nazis, and they will be defeated.
Amusingly @Inevitablewest who he followed claiming to be a British patriot was recently exposed as "Saurabh Chandrakar, an Indian former fruit juice seller accused of masterminding one of the most high-profile betting frauds in Asia" who isn't a brit and doesn't live here https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14381309/Far-Right-...
There's also https://x.com/PeterSweden7 "Holocaust denier white nationalist, extreme-homophobe, (former?) Flat Earther, (former?) Moon landing denialist, Islamophobe and conspiracy theorist crank" who Musk sources. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Peter_Sweden
Which goes to explain how a lot of what Musk says about the UK is odd.
That's not an insult... And while provocative this is not weird. Everyone sees where things are going in the UK and Europe in general and a violent backlash is at least a plausible risk at some point. In fact, he made that comment during riots in the UK...
> and slagging Starmer.
In fairness, everyone does. Starmer is one of the most unpopular PMs in history after only about 6 months in power.
>The UK has become a police state https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1857420350516056102
and this thing https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1822290335059353965
are not very positive. I'm guessing you're not from the UK? If someone started posting "the US is a fascist hell hole" or whatever might you not find it annoying? And it's mostly based on ignorance and not visiting the country.
And just for the record it's not a police state and the justice system is not like the second tweet. I mean you can say what you like but it may put people off buying the cars.
by the way re
>In fact, he made that comment during riots in the UK...
The riots were to a large extent set off by bullshit from Twitter/Musk - they put out that three girls had been murdered by an asylum seeker so a bunch of people went to riot at the asylum centers but it turned out to be basically false as the murder was UK born.
I started with a genuine question, which has strangely been downvoted, and the many replies went in all directions except providing an actual reply...
Regarding "the UK has become a police state" so if I understand when privacy groups say it HN agrees but when Musk says it it is unhinged and fascist... right. Now, I don't agree with the claim but how it is received is telling...
> they put out that three girls had been murdered by an asylum seeke
Which should show you that Musk had a point! That is exactly symptomatic of how things are going in a worrying direction in Europe regarding immigration. The issue is that people don't want to see and certainly not when Musk is telling them because that would be "far right " or "fascist"...
I can't believe HN devolved to a point where tehy are using anecdotes to justify racism. I thought we were supposed to be curious and data-driven?
Have a nice day.
if there really is organized mass corruption then it could be an “ adversarial deep state campaign”. The claims of wrongdoing are so severe that they need to start providing the evidence publicly asap and file some charges.
I honestly don’t know what to think yet but I agree with you the level of vitriol and unhinged comments is at extreme levels and even here on HN. That said he is intentionally trying to mass trigger as many people as possible likely strategically for a reason we can’t see yet.
That said, I doubt Musk's politics have had much of a positive or negative effect on Tesla's sales. There's been a significant increase in competition at the same time as many European countries are entering recessions. That's going to be a much bigger factor.
Moreover, one of these agencies is run by a left-wing comrade who is a qualified social education worker. However, the agency should actually be headed by a lawyer, as in the Thuringian law, which was simply reinterpreted in the case of Stephan J. Kramer.
So yeah, that's an trustworthy argument.
Their policies are mainstream right wing policies, like favouring legal migration over illegal migration.
If you care about intellectual honesty, understand that the "fascism" label applied to AFD (or Trump, Musk et al) is inaccurate and inappropriate. It's the left throwing whatever mud they can hoping some will stick.
Meanwhile AfD act like actual neo-Nazis:
"In January 2024, it was revealed that senior members of the party, including Roland Hartwig, then advisor to party co-leader Alice Weidel, attended a meeting alongside neo-Nazi influencers, where plans for the deportation of millions of "asylum seekers", "non-assimilated people", and those with "non-German backgrounds" were discussed, including those with German citizenship and residency rights.[348] The event triggered the 2024 German anti-extremism protests. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_for_Germany#Neo-Na...
Clearly this AfD's choice and nothing to do with the left wing.
There's nothing extremist about that. It's a mainstream right wing policy, and one that is also popular with the general public.
Okay so they actually care about intellectual honesty. You need to stop selling.
The ones that love jewish community?
It takes them awhile sometimes, but they’ll get here.
(If this website were actually important, this would be a pretty significant vulnerability; it's fairly trivial to suppress the visibility of any given article with really quite a small number of people.)
Antisemitism is not a prerequisite for fascism - wanting to have a different religious group put in camps is not the slam dunk differentiator you think it is.
Nazis were not the only type of fascism in history. Simply the most infamous one.
The ones that are found by the German courts to warrant close surveillance for extremism and anti-democratic goals.
Whose prominent politicans have been found guilty of intentionally using Nazi slogans:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-69012813
The same politican sued protesters calling him fascist for libel, and lost. The court ruled that there were sufficient factual grounds to justify using the label.
What is a "certified fascist"? Do they have to have an actual certificate? Do they need to pass an exam?
And I'm surprised a nazi would sue for defamation: I'd guess most nazis wouldn't.
Though having seen the enormous German self-flagellation about Nazism and WWII, I wouldn't be surprised if their courts overcompensated somewhat in the other direction...
Pro-fossil fuel, yes. Anti EV? No.
"Yes, making Nazi salutes is good actually" is a _rather niche position_ in most of Europe (particularly in wealthy countries); even _actual neo-Nazis_ sometimes shy away from the imagery a bit.
For example not every Trump supporter walks around with a MAGA hat. It's one thing to anonymously vote for Trump, it's another to make it public and deal with all the social backlash.
Driving a new Tesla is pretty much a MAGA hat.
https://www.newsweek.com/usaid-elon-musk-starlink-probe-ukra...
What he did was identical to a classic nazi sieg heil, right down the forcefulness.
https://imgur.com/UFrmbJs
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
― George Orwell, 1984
The entire world knows it is a nazi salute, and people defending it do too.
This isn't "his political views", this are evil actions, it is indefensible. The person who has everything wants to take more from the people who have nothing.
Also keep in mind that many European countries entered a recession over the past year. Also keep in mind that the cost of electricity has tripled since Putin attacked Ukraine.
The partisan types will ascribe Tesla's sales fall to Musk's politics, but I suspect that's actually a small effect compared to some of the broader market dynamics.
[1] https://electrek.co/2025/02/06/tesla-sales-crash-in-another-...
I think this is not the right way to look at it. Essentially, Tesla sells the car for a price that is higher than the sum of all the input costs (the margin). Say this margin is around $10k per car. If the factories have more inventory, they could give customers a $5k discount, but they could also sell it for the full price but give a sub 1% loan. They probably loan that money for about 3 to 5%. So they only take a hit of a few procent for 2 years meaning $60k * 0.04 * 0.04 = $4800. My point is that a low percentage loan is essentially the same as discount on the purchase price.
Do these continues price decreases mean that things look dire? Based on solely this information, not necessarily. Battery costs are a large part of the cost of the car, and battery costs are consistently coming down. This saves a few thousand dollars per year. So I expect prices to come down each year. That fact alone is not a problem.
Having said that, we know that Tesla's margins have consistently come down for the last 3 years, and we know that Chinese cars become more competitive each year. So things aren't looking great. But again, price declines are expected and not necessarily a problem. I would say market share is the most important metric to look at.
And that's expensive.
Yup, and I don’t care. I liked the brand better without the drama queen.
> I guess a great trick would be for a CEO to have a large social media presence but still side step culture war issues?
Most CEO's these days do, yes. Maybe not "large" but a noticeable precense.
given America these days: what's the difference? Elon bought the election for much cheaper than Twitter.
Your theory, that people were waiting for the MY refresh doesn’t seem likely. According to my experience most people aren’t as much informed of the inside baseball when a new model arrives. Nerd stuff.
Edit, Sources, the F10 Excel spreadsheets here:
2025: https://www.kba.de/DE/Statistik/Fahrzeuge/Neuzulassungen/Mon...
2024: https://www.kba.de/DE/Statistik/Fahrzeuge/Neuzulassungen/Mon...
As a Tesla owner myself, it makes me very uncomfortable to think my car is remotely associated with a hate group. I wouldn't buy one today nor do I recommend it to others.
Politically, I'm fairly left wing, concerned about democracy and climate change. Elon Musk's politics is easily enough to make sure I'd never purchase anything he's associated with.
That said, for buying an EV, tradional car manufacturers have mostly caught up with where Tesla is now, as a European buyer, I could get a high quality EV much cheaper from longer established brands with more effecient supply chains.
Seems pretty tricky to try and untangle those two effects.
However monthly Tesla numbers has historically had a high month-to-month variance, and they had very good numbers at the end of last year[2].
So at least here I wouldn't say we're seeing a trend just yet.
[1]: https://www.nrk.no/nyheter/tesla-salget-stupte-i-norge-i-jan...
[2]: https://www.tek.no/nyheter/nyhet/i/4BV7LE/bilsalget-ny-tesla...
That law is changing though: The taxation applies only to cars up to €60k list price (most Teslas exceed that by now, even Model 3s with some extras), and as electricity prices have been soaring, charging the EV got really expensive.
Adding to that, interest rates have been increasing in 2022 for the first time in a long time. This means that leasing rates and financing rates skyrocketed. So as another commenter wrote: Buying a new car is one of the least worries of Germans at the moment.
Elon's maternal grandfather died when he was young but apparently his maternal grandmother had a great influence on him and was likely a fellow traveller living in a house that celebrated all things Nazi.
For those who might not be up to date on that, parent refers to Musk's nazi salute: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R_6dVlz6mug
Now he's taken over a foreign government to pursue overly fascist goals, being seen in public in a new Tesla is just not something I can consider.
Doing this in Germany would be even more inconceivable.
I can't imagine this is an unusual way to feel.