If you look at places like Reddit where the organizing is happening, they don't differentiate between left-leaning buyers of years past, and in fact call them out for being complicit by not selling their (paid for?) car. It's scorched earth and is not limited to new buyers.
Reddit might not be representative of the larger shift. I am sure there is plenty of hatred, and even violence that makes the news, and that stuff is bad, but I mostly see people politely nudging those they know that own Teslas to sell them.
Which makes sense. The company sold to left-leaning, environmentally conscious buyers, and the CEO has now rebranded Tesla to basically the worst thing for that demographic. Sales are down, resale values are dropping, and insurance rates are rising. And there is no real opportunity on the horizon to save the company and/or the brand (robotaxis without LiDAR..?)
Maybe it looks like scorched earth on reddit, but in reality it's just a lot of people realizing the brand has self-destructed.
It's even more confusing, who are they supposed to sell it to, if no one should drive these cars (and how big of a loss are they expected to take in order to sell it)?
If a foreign government that the US was acting hostile towards was so inclined, they could highly tariff Tesla sales/service and offer buy-outs to make existing owners whole where they simply crush and recycle the cars to deny Tesla any service revenue.
Sounds dramatic (scorched earth! my lord), but the posts I've seen are like, "here's the anti-tesla flyer that was left on my friend's tesla" and then a bunch of upvoted comments replying that it's dumb and counterproductive to target people who bought their teslas years ago.
> It's scorched earth and is not limited to new buyers.
This whole thing is about destroying already bought vehicles to intimidate potential new buyers, and thus lowering future sales. Not that I support the vandalism, but I think that's the kind of logic they are applying here.
Build quality is so bad, those old cars will destroy themselves. Wonder how many of the original 2018 model 3 are still on the road. The other day I saw a comment chastising a person complaining about their 120k Model 3 battery failing and how its already at end of life. I was gobsmacked.
I also see reports of some Tesla making it to 500k miles. Honestly there is so much nonsense on both sides and you can't even trust any numbers coming out of Tesla because they have distorted the truth so many times.
Listen every company will make mistakes at some point in their life. Toyota has earned so much of a reputation of quality over many decades that it has become a meme and is reflected in resale values and insurance rates. Tesla continues to produce sub standard quality and thanks to their actions they have burned their reputation with everyone other than their shareholders so they don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore. How many times are they going to promise this or that and say that they have fixed their quality only to find out they have lied yet again?
