We seem to be living in a time when the most mundane actions take on political significance.
Take for example the wearing of masks. Rather than taking it at face value, which is that the wearer may have reduced immunity or is taking a cautious approach to the transmission of infection diseases and is trying to avoid getting infected or infect others, some view it as the wearer making a political statement in support of the vaccination lobby and the medical-pharmaceutical-Fauci axis of evil and against freedom-loving Merkins.
The same thing seems to be happening with Tesla cars where drivers report being harassed by other users, often by people driving big, gas-guzzling, smoke-belching trucks. The animosity seems to not be against Tesla particularly but against people who, by driving an electric vehicle, are seen as signaling that they are concerned about the environment.
Teslas are common in the Bellevue, Washington, area, where Theresa Ramsdell lives and has owned two models since 2016. “People cut us off on the freeway, give us the finger, yell at me through the windows,” she said. “A couple of people have not exactly tried to push me off the road, but drive real close to the side of my car and smile. It’s happened to me twice going at 65 mph and it’s scary.”
Marc Geller, spokesperson for the Electric Vehicle Association and a Tesla owner himself, has owned a battery-powered car of some sort since 2000. He said that road rage traditionally came from rightwingers who see the electric vehicle drivers as crunchy liberals.
The reason that Tesla drivers are being targeted may have little to do with Elon Musk’s shenanigans. It is probably because even though many car manufacturers now produce electric vehicles, that is just one part of their fleet. You cannot immediately tell from the car’s brand whether it is electric or not without examining it closely, whereas Tesla is uniquely identified with it.
It will be interesting to see if whether now that Musk is acting like any other right-wing, Trump loving, liberal-bashing troll, those who have been harassing Tesla drivers will now see him as one of their own and suddenly switch to supporting the car brand that is identified with him. They might begin to view Tesla drivers a making a statement in support of Musk though that is as silly as viewing mask wearers as supporters of Anthony Fauci.
Marc Geller, spokesperson for the Electric Vehicle Association and a Tesla owner himself, has owned a battery-powered car of some sort since 2000. He said that road rage traditionally came from rightwingers who see the electric vehicle drivers as crunchy liberals.
But now that Musk has become something of a conservative hero – telling his followers to vote Republican in the midterms and reinstating Donald Trump’s Twitter account – he’s a foe to many electric vehicle fans, too.
“There’s an irony here in that Teslas have long been a hate magnet for various reasons,” Geller said. “They were the subject of road rage because they represented the environment and were perceived as the vehicular embodiment of that culture war. But now here we are, and some folks on the left are having a knee-jerk reaction because Elon Musk has taken this ominous turn to the political right, so now they’re throwing the same bricks.”
Sometimes a car is just a car.
Long before there *were* EVs, car ownership was political. If you bought a foreign car in the US, you were anti-American. I used to joke that while the Buy American people might own an American car, every other possession was made in China.
“I used to joke that while the Buy American people might own an American car, every other possession was made in China.” And a lot of the car was probably made in China. For a while now buying an American car simply means that the only part of the American economy you are supporting (as far as the car itself is concerned) is enriching American executives.
Also, there have always been EVs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicle
I remember one of my family cars when I was growing up. My dad worked as a maintenance man at various factories over the years. My family picked up a chrysler minivan around the late 80’s or early 90’s. In theory, it was an American car. My dad popped the hood and said it had a Mitsubishi engine and there was some other major part I can’t recall that was from another foreign company. My parents felt confused. Buying a car they thought was made in America was one of the selling points.
Walmart is another example of this. At the start they claimed they sold only products that were made in America. When they got what they wanted out of that they quietly removed those claims and sourced their products wherever it was cheapest while paying their massive workforce so little that a significant percentage of them need public assistance. So they went from “made in America” to getting corporate welfare handouts that stealthily subsidize their business of making America pay so they can import products.
I bought a Tesla car recently. The reasons were purely practical and I most definitely bought a car and not a piece of Elon Musk. Climate change was one of the reasons I picked it up but that’s not political, it’s just practical. I give climate change deniers all the serious consideration I would if they were suggesting that turn lanes should instead be used to go straight. A lot of the time they’d be fine not turning but it would also cause accidents, cost a lot of money and hurt people for no reason whatsoever. Willful ignorance is not a political position. It’s something to be ignored, brushed aside, or plowed through. Get it out of the way as quickly as possible.
Quick caveat: Sometimes road rage against an expensive car is just road rage against someone having something you can’t afford. WIthout asking the people doing it (and being willing to accept their answer at face value) there’s no real way to know their motives.
With a couple of exceptions, I only ever bought used ‘American’ cars in the last 22 years. American cars have a lower resale value than European or Japanese cars, so they’re cheaper to buy and for most part, they’re very reliable. The most notorious example is a used (7 years old) Police Interceptor I bought for $1700, drove for 8 years (80,000 miles) and sold for $1200.
I put ‘American’ in quotes only because a large number of them were manufactured in Canada or Mexico (and some even further abroad) and components are sourced from all over the World. On the flip side, a large number of Hondas, Toyotas, even BMWs are built in the USA today.
So, which is an American car and which is foreign? Question of semantics and perception, I suppose.
mastmaker @4:
My guess is that an “American” car is one with a brand name that’s owned by some holding company (which doesn’t actually make anything but money) that has its headquarters in the U.S.—not a particularly useful distinction, but there it is.
“… that has its headquarters in the U.S.”
Unless the company takes advantage of corporate inversion, in which case a rented office in Ireland could become their HQ