So, what’s your ride? Something electric perhaps? Maybe a Tesla? It’s not a fun time to be owning a Musketeer vehicle right now. Who would have known that instead of driving your EV vehicle with sustainable pride, you would suddenly find yourself a moving target. Tesla drivers are now shamed and yelled at where ever they go. Could it be to do with Musk’s controversial antics, his connection to Mr. Trumpet, along with his new role as the US bureaucracy slasher? What is clear cut, is that the man of innovation has shown his true Cyber colours: as an entitled, chainsaw massacring idiot.
In a random bathroom many moons ago, I remember reading on the wall, “If you’re going to keep shitting on the world, the world will reply energetically.” While Elon Musk is certainly not in any danger of struggling to make ends meet, his astronomical wealth has taken a huge hit. Since the beginning of this year, he has lost $126 billion off his own personal wealth which is nothing to sneeze at. What his handlers seem to forget, is that Tesla is synonymous with Musk and Musk is synonymous with Tesla. And now Teslas have become a symbol of Trump and his brainchild, the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE. The optics didn’t help a few weeks ago, seeing Lord Rump sitting in the driver’s seat of a red Tesla with Musk riding shotgun, gushing, “I’m going to buy a brand new Tesla tomorrow morning as a show of confidence and support for Elon Musk, a truly great American.”
But it’s not all bad news, he’s still the richest person in the world, with a total baffling net worth of $307 billion, followed by mild-mannered Jeff Bezos who has a net worth of $218 billion. Despite the stock price drop, Tesla’s market value is currently over $700 billion US, which still makes it the world’s most valuable automaker. Even the Tesla Model Y was the top-selling vehicle last year.
Bob Porter, president of the Vancouver Electric Vehicle Association said he wants people to know that getting behind the wheel of a Tesla isn’t a political statement for most drivers. “You are conscious that you’re driving a Tesla and people see you, and you do worry about, will there be any repercussions?” “Emotions are running high so, of course, people are looking at Tesla owners like we are all part of his club, and it’s not true,” he said. To bring some humour into this otherwise depressing time, a bumper sticker on the back of Porter’s Tesla reads, “I bought this before Elon went crazy.”
One dealership in Vancouver was recently vandalized with an obscene remark about Musk spray-painted on the wall. In Ontario, 80 Tesla vehicles parked outdoors were damaged and a Tesla was put on fire at a local parking lot. In Montreal, two people were caught spray painting the outside of a Tesla dealership. Even the Vancouver International Auto Show had to remove Teslas from its event citing safety concerns.
Similar incidents have happened down south. Trump accused “radical Left lunatics” of boycotting Tesla and said that people vandalizing its sites would be regarded as “domestic terrorists.” Attorney General Pam Bondi announced charges against three “violent Tesla arsonists.” Bondi said in a statement: “Let this be a warning: if you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars.”
In true American fashion: One person was accused of being armed with a suppressed AR-15 rifle and throwing eight Molotov cocktails at a Tesla dealership in Oregon. In South Carolina, someone wrote “profane messages against President Trump” on some Tesla charging stations before using Molotov cocktails to burn the units. In Colorado, a person was arrested and accused of trying to light Tesla vehicles on fire with Molotov cocktails. In Las Vegas, a person armed with a gun fired three rounds into different Tesla vehicles and used Molotov cocktails to set some on fire. And in New York, a Cybertruck was defaced with a swastika.
The UK-based group Everyone Hates Elon has been branding hundreds of Tesla vehicles in London with stickers saying “don’t buy swasticars.” Two left-wing activist groups, Led By Donkeys from Britain and Germany’s Center for Political Beauty, recently claimed responsibility for beaming an image of Elon Musk making his “inauguration salute” onto Tesla’s gigafactory in Berlin, along with the words “Heil Tesla.”
With all this rage and anger, instead of pulling their cars off the road, many owners are pulling the Tesla logos off their cars and either replacing them with other auto names or leaving the make and model to our imagination. Disguising the sedans shouldn’t be too hard given that they look like every other new car on the road. However the Cybertank is another story altogether. These stainless steel wedgies are not trucks; they’re fashion statements.
And just when the orders started flying in, the side metal panels started flying off these supposedly indestructible trucks. It’s the latest in a series of setbacks for Tesla, which has grappled with numerous recall issues, including one involving “the possibility of unintended acceleration from a trapped pedal” as well as incorrectly installed trunk beds that could fall off.
We have two Cybertanks on our island. They scream look at me…. I’m driving “the Transformers version of an Oscar Meyer Wiener mobile!” It looks like a Hummer that took a bunch of steroids and had sex with a M1A2 Abrams tank. Or as one individual wrote,“it looks like a roller skate had sex with a creeper from Minecraft.” I guess that’s cool to some people. They’ll need it, when they take the heat…for the next four years.
