It's the intention that matters?
It's the intention that matters?
¯(ツ)/¯
108 comments
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This is less a response exclusively to this post and more the Tesla discourse broadly
I get we really wanna find people to hate because it makes us feel better about how deeply broken our world is but a lot of folks bought teslas long before we knew Elon would undergo his transformation into a public nazi.
Having bought a product from a person who later turns out to be a huge piece of shit doesn't make you a bad person. And cars are major financial choices that depreciate MASSIVELY the moment they're yours.
I get we all wanna say "Tesla expensive therefore they're rich and they can afford to blow another massive sum of money on another car to replace the tesla", but like... A) lots of Tesla drives are not rich. They're the exact people we have to remind that they are still dirty poors compared to the actual rich people that we need to tax way more. And even for people pretty well off, blowing that kind of money on a purely performative, symbolic replacement of a product they already gave Elon money for is an objectively dumb choice.
We have mocked conservatives for dumb boycotts where they burn their shoes or dump out all their beer from a brand they no linger respect, but we turn around and set the expectation that others with a product we don't like follow exact same logic for what is the second largest category of purchase most people will ever make in their life.
For all the people who will never be able to afford a house because we live in a capitalist hellscape it's the most expensive category of purchase there is. And it depreciates massively the instant it became theirs.
I'm all for mocking cybertruck owners, they bought a shit car, from a shit man, and more importantly they gave him a lot of money knowing how dangerous and horrible he is.
But owning a Tesla doesn't immediately make you a bad person and a fascist. For a lot of people it means you bought the best made electric car on the market because you care about the environment.
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"Best EV on the market"? Not by a long shot, I don't think.
AutoExpress list:
Rank Model 1 Citroën e-C3 2 Skoda Elroq 3 Kia EV3 4 Renault 5 E-Tech 5 Hyundai Kona Electric 6 Renault Scenic 7 Volvo EX30 8 Tesla Model 3 9 BMW i4 10 Leapmotor T03 -
That article is from 2025, many people bought their teslas at a time when the largest well known "competitor" was the Nisan leaf, a car built with less engineering competency/care than a tin can of beans. The batteries have no active cooling system meaning that one of the most expensive components in the car is going to loose a meaningful amount of lifespan every time you use it, degrading an already crap range
Now the market has lots of good options, but there was a hoooot minute where Tesla was way ahead of anyone else and the best option an environmentally conscious shopper who wanted a new car or an electric car could choose (since EVs weren't widely available on the used market until we got enough of them. Whole convo to be had about whether it was better to buy used or a new electric but that's beside the point)
Edit to add context: the first consumer Tesla models came out in 2010
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That hasn't always been the case. It's hard to imagine now, but 5-10 years ago electric car options were pretty limited especially if you wanted one that had a good range and didn't look ugly as fuck. Not only that, but at the time Elon was just "regular rich guy" bad and not openly fascist. I don't blame anyone for buying a Tesla back then.
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You know, i completely get your point and I agree with you. Except that all the tesla drives i've met are assholes on the road, only second to bmw drivers. for example, i've had one of the tesla cunts cut in front of me via undertaking in the middle of heavy traffic this week. I watched their ass the entire way through it. Brainless activities like that make me hate BMW and tesla drivers in particular
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That is a perfectly valid frustration lol. I've not noticed that but I can empathize with noticing patterns in which brand owners drive like dicks.
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This is inaccurate. It is not even close to the best made electric car on the market, it is not even a well made car, period.
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Was. It was the best made electric car on the market. For a loooong time. For a long time there were barely any other choices at all, nevermind good choices.
The market has now caught up, and elon musk has announced himself to be a Nazi. Exactly zero good reasons left to buy a Tesla. But it explicitly was the best option by a landslide for quite a while, assuming you could afford one.
As someone who was really excited about electric cars I sat waiting for a long time trying to see when they would have meaningful competition. Its there now, but it sure as hell didn't used to be.
Edit: double checked and the first consumer models of tesla came out in 2010. They're that old. I think people who weren't paying attention to cars and EVs might not have realized just how long there were no meaningful competitors.
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As a current Tesla Model Y owner I appreciate this post.
I can also state emphatically that I’m “one and done” with Tesla. I’ll never buy another car from them as long as Musk is involved in any way with the company. Even before he started kissing MAGA ass I realized his heavy handed technology decisions with the cars was a turn off. While there are a few unique features I like, I hate having to dig through touch screen menus just to do things like turn on the windshield wipers. The unique features just aren’t enough to overlook all those other poor usability decisions.
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Totally valid. You're not a bad person. People are just justifiably angry and it makes them better to find people who's head they can tell themselves it's okay to put on a pike.
It kinda feels like a big problem in very left leaning spaces that people would rather prioritize doing the thing that demonstrates their anger, or let's them take their anger out on someone, than actually think about what way of engaging with the problem would be productive 😅. Personally I find that super frustrating and think it's will guarantee we can't meaningfully address the rise of fascism
Anyway, hope you have a good day, take care! :)
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People supporting oil companies do not have the moral high ground here just because the fascist, murderous billionaires they support financially have the good sense to not do Nazi salutes on a stage. They're still responsible for incredible amounts of suffering and death, ongoing.
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Owning a Tesla doesn't make you a bad person that's right, but Elon was a complete idiot at least since his PayPal time.
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Imagine if we all broadly put a fraction of a fraction of the effort we put into performative boycotts and infighting into actually getting involved in our local communities, organizing, fundraising and getting to know our local representatives.
You know, the things that have allowed capitalism to have unfettered access to our highest offices. The things that get ZERO media coverage and less hype, even broadly made fun of as lame or pathetic. If we cared at all about our local community and who represents us closest, we would have at least slowed down this march of endless growth that has made each of us into a commodity who thinks we're winning when we talk about brands and boycotts.
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Yeah, but why do that when we can be sanctimoniously mean to others while feeling morally superior to everyone else?
Ideology built on pluralism and we're having debate about whether it's cool to be mean to people because they made a choice we don't like (with the fucking benefit of hindsight). Surely if we're mean to people it'll solve all our problems right???
Sorry clearly I'm no longer capable of engaging with people productively and should step away from the keyboard lol. I 100% agree. There are so many things worth our emotional energy. Bullying people and arguing why they deserve to be targeted maybe isn't one of them 🙃🙃🙃
I want off this ride lol.
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Boycotting Tesla isn't performative. Elon owns 12% of Tesla. Tesla's net profit per car is $8k. 12% of $8k is $960. Tesla stock has a PE ratio of 200x. $960 x 200 = $192,000.
That's right, every Tesla sold is worth $192,000 to Elon in stock value.
Elon uses that value to support Trump and overthrow Democracy worldwide.
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The ‘please don’t spray paint my car’ label.
Not saying I don’t turn my nose up at regular Teslas, but it’s the Cyberfuck owners that have my real contempt. You’re choosing to continue driving that thing around.
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Those and the facelifted model y's
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Here is a way to know how many children Elon Musk killed https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-anticipated-deaths-from-usaid-funding-cuts/
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Lovely
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If this is a case of buying it before he was clearly a moron and calling people a pedo for saving people then maybe fair enough. Anything after that though and you made your choice
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It's the purchase date that matters. The newer it is, the less of an excuse they have for having bought it.
To be clear, if they'd really been paying attention they could've known Musk was a piece of shit way back even before the Model S came out. (Early warning signs included, for example, Tesla's open hostility towards its customers' property rights, including right to repair.) But normies would not have been paying attention to that.
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Yeah. He's also been retweeting Nazis for years.
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a few $1 stickers should cancel out my $40k endorsement of elon musk
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Is it in any way possible that A: it was purchased used from a private seller, and/or 2: it was purchased prior to, whichever event you personally consider the start of his departure from reality. It's easy to forget now, considering [gestures vaguely at a cloud of toxic fumes emanating from the smoldering husk of a once democratic nation], but there was a time not so very long ago when Musk was considered a liberal and eco-friendly darling.
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I took a similar pic recently!
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Probably would blur the license plate just to be courteous.
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the only information a layman can get from it, in my understanding, is the tech specs of the vehicle, which you can deduce from other context clues (make, model, design) anyway.
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Do I still have eggs in this scenario?
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Democracy voted fascism in…
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At least it's not like the cybertruck I walked past a couple weeks ago, which had multiple 'Harris Walz 2024' stickers on the sides and back.
...Yeah, I dunno.
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No it doesn't
Fuck Elmo
Fuck Tesla's l, all of em
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IDK tesla used to just be a car, if they bought it after 2024 definitely fuck them and their telsa, but before that the CEO was kind of a dick, but find one that isn't.
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Yeeaahh, no. Musk was a lying sack of shit since forever. Try looking into Hyperloop, for example, which killed the California high-speed rail and caused 50 billion in investments world wide in dead end technology, all courtesy of Elmo. And that is a single example.
The only forgiving factor would be that the entire world had their eyes closed
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Elon is a shitbag. He has always been a shitbag. Most people didn’t realize it until he was throwing around Nazi salutes. These stickers don’t mean anything. Or do anything to change my opinion of you and your view of Elon.
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Sell the car. Making payments on it while saying you don't endorse Musk feels a bit contradictory.
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the car is already purchased. the debt is to the bank. not making payments is irrelevant.
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Sell it TO WHOM?!
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Fucking aquaman?
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Part of why we're in this current mess is because too many people thought naively that the average person has room in their lives for ideology or that the average working american gives a shit about culture war when there's not enough time or money in the day to even take a breath, much less live a life.
They don't. The well isn't poisoned, it's dried out. If we put Tesla out of business tomorrow Elon will still be wealthy enough to buy nations and people's teslas will still be sitting in their garages slowly depreciating like every other consumer good.
I much, much, MUCH rather see someone put that time and energy that they would use to sell their car into getting involved in their local community organizing or county elections. Those are the systems that allowed people like Musk and Trump to seize power in America and those are also the ones that get ZERO media hype. Not a coincidence. Same distraction is happening in the "culture war" every day and we're all losing.
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Still a fascist supporter
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“I hate your guts and I do not support anything you say or do. Here, take 100,000 dollars.”
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They should still sell it
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Not the easiest the sell a car. I bet even less easy with a Tesla in the current situation. They probably may be able to buy something cheaper if they sold it. The question is could they buy a another EV if they sold this one? They are probably stuck with their Tesla.
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Simply get rid of the vehicle that you use to commute to work, do your shopping, go to appointments, and generally live your life outside your home and a couple-mile radius of it! Simple!
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If Tesla owners don't want to be potentially harassed or targeted for the car they bought then the solution is to not drive it
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Sure, I could sell it, have thousands of euros of a loss on it and be without a car. Should I setup a godundme for the loss? I sure as hell can't afford it.
108 comments