People Will Forget Tesla’s Origins: CRERAR
Whether or not you like entrepreneur Elon Musk, his association with U.S. President Donald Trump has disrupted the Tesla marketplace.
Vehicle sales are down worldwide, the company’s stock is plummeting, dealerships are being terrorized by angry mobs, and owners are having their cars defaced. Consumers who purchased Teslas did so for many reasons; as a means to help conserve the environment, as a status symbol, because the technology is intriguing, because being associated with leading edge technology is cool and the like.
But is it fair that their vehicles are being trashed?
Let’s step back in time to 1938, when Ferdinand Porsche first introduced the Volkswagen Beetle to the German marketplace. Note that the term Volkswagen translates to a car (wagen) for the common people (volks). Porsche’s original intent was to mass produce a vehicle that anyone could afford. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler latched onto the idea of affordability and became a poster boy for Volkswagen.
You may have seen one of the many photographs that were taken of him admiring the car during his rise to power. Like Musk’s Tesla, the concept was great but the person behind the product was abhorent to most people, at least to those who weren’t living in Germany at the time.
In 2024, the Vokswagen Group delivered roughly 4.8 million vehicles (VW, Audi, Lamborghini, Porsche, etc) to customers worldwide. Bearing in mind the origins of Volkswagen, why isn’t the public spray painting its various brands with graffiti the way they are with Teslas?
The reason is time heals all wounds and eventually current-day perceptions of Musk will change, maybe for the better, maybe for the worse. But the people who have purchased Teslas do not deserve to be harassed because the founder of the company isn’t capable of running a project for the U.S. government or smart enough to choose his friends wisely.
Howard Crerar is a project manager and has worked in the software industry for three decades.
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In Volkswagen, the vehicle manufacturer was a company. Just because Hitler like the company does not mean he represented the company. Tesla is different – Musk is synonymous with Tesla – they are one in the same. He is the figurehead and owner. Musk unfortunately said a lot of things disparaging Europeans, Canada (“Canada isn’t even a real country”), and thousands of Americans that faithfully served their country’s administration that were fired calling them basically useless idiots. So when you have an abusive figurehead, you will have less sales. Like 70% less. And people will take out their anger and frustration on the abuser somehow. Tesla and Musk were Disrupters to society – creating an entirely new industry though innovations and marketing. But now they have been overtaken technologically by their competitors and all that is left is the marketing which is now in the dumps. It will be overtaken like BlackBerry, Netscape, MySpace, etc.
In addition to the points that C makes above, you have forgotten a very important factor, Howard. Musk got into the place he currently occupies through donating obscene amounts of his fortune to Donald Trump and his followers in the US. So where did that money come from? Some came from his other enterprises but a large part is derived from the profits he made, and continues to make, from the sale of Tesla vehicles. According to Forbes, 58.3% of Musk’s wealth comes from Tesla.
He is using the profits from his Tesla company directly to attack American citizens and to attack Canada and Canadians. He himself has placed his companies in the line of fire for the anger and resentment across Canada, the US and, indeed, across the world.
It’s a bit much to say that time heals all wounds – are you suggesting that Hitler has been or will be rehabilitated? You did, of course, leave out one thing which people see as a Musk-Hitler link and that is the Nazi salute which many people, myself included, find offensive.
Anyone associated with Musk and/or Tesla that repudiates his actions has a simple choice that they can make. They can disassociate themselves from him. That would include business associates, owners of his car dealerships and owners of the vehicles that brought him to his current position of power. People sometimes fall in, advertently or inadvertently, with a bad crowd. The solution to that is to remove yourself as quickly as you can. If you don’t do that, you have to be prepared to accept the consequences. Should you continue to lie down with dogs, don’t be surprised if you rise up with fleas.