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The Trump-Musk friendship had already crumbled, but now it seems like it's actively imploding.
Musk went nuclear against Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill", calling it a "disgusting abomination". In response, the White House is "very disappointed" in the criticism. In other words, they're probably saying "fuck you, Elon" behind closed doors. Trump had previously been anomalously deferential to Musk, but if you read between the lines you could see there was trouble in paradise. Musk feuded with other members of the administration and Trump didn't back him up. Musk was causing enough chaos that he was starting to be seen as a political liability, and so Musk was somewhat gently pushed out of his role. People like Hanania who claimed the bromance would last have been proven incorrect, at least on this point.
Trump's budget is broadly awful, exploding the deficit to pay for regressive tax cuts, so I hope it dies.
Tesla is Musk's biggest source of capital, and it's sales, at least in Europe, were fueled by virtue signalling. Now imagine the look on the face of the exact type of person, that wants to be seen as saving the planet, suddenly being seen as a Nazi instead. Tesla's sales are tanking accordingly, so I consider Elon to be a dead man walking, if he loses political backing. The drama being about the budget, I wonder if he wasn't hoping for some bailout to be included there, which didn't materialize.
Anyway, if being cut loose is a foregone conclusion, he might figure that he might as well drag everyone else down with him.
That's an interesting play, since a fair amount of Trump's base isn't so hot on exploding budgets, so maybe he'll manage to stir the pot this way. But these days it feels like the budget can only explode, and if anyone tried doing something crazy, like balancing it, the whole system would collapse.
If you want a top tier electric car these days, get a BYD, not a Tesla. Tesla only has the best self driving these days and if that's not important to you or you don't think regulations will permit it in your jurisdiction any time soon there's no reason to go Tesla anymore. It has nothing to do with virtue signalling.
I don't know what to tell you man, from my neighbors to coworkers, it's a very specific type of person that even thinks of buying an EV.
Absolutely this. Firstly the choice to want an EV in the first place is purely virtue signalling - nobody I know ever justified it with anything other than highfalutin saving-the-planet rethoric - and secondly the choice to not pick a Tesla might have been justified by practicality, but let's be frank: it isn't. What it is is "Musk man bad". EVs are like anything related to the whole "carbon is killing the planet" narrative and its associated Ablaßhandel (Indulgence/Pardon Industry) - 100% virtue signalling.
It's so very obvious that as far as I'm concerned, any claim to the contrary will need thorough justification. I'd have to contort myself into a pretzel of charity to pretend otherwise.
Just this past week my wife and I have been discussing replacing a ten year old ICE car with an EV. The main motivations are simpler maintenance and charging from our solar panels.
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I do not think that climate change is an x-risk. I do not even believe that climate change will necessarily flood big parts of the landmasses, likely we can handle a few meters of sea level rise the Netherlands way.
However, this is not the same as saying that it is not a big deal. The amount of population regions can feed will definitely change, and often for the worse.
Besides CO2, there are a few other arguments against ICEs. First, as long as fossil fuels are the lifeblood of transportation, the world will always be beholden to the few countries which are blessed with that resource. GWB's misadventure in Iraq was a consequence of that region having oil and thus being of strategic importance to the US and his buddies.
Then there are regional health effects of minor combustion products. I will totally grant you that ICEs have improved tremendously since the 1970s in that regard. Still, depending on where you live, my gut feeling is that these products might still make up a good fraction of a QALY for you. Even if you don't care personally, it should be apparent that society is caring more and more for these things over time. If you by a fancy new ICE car today, there is perhaps a 10% chance that you will not be allowed to drive it withing some European cities without retrofitting more exhaust cleaning in a decade.
Then you might believe that the gas prices will increase more than the electricity prices in the long run.
Also, while modern ICEs are marvels of technology which evolved to be very reliably over a century, the fact remains that fundamentally, they are complex machines. In principle, an EV could be a lot simpler. In practice, we don't know yet (apart from the battery requiring replacement at some point).
Personally, I would not have bought either a Tesla or a high end German EV because I don't care for the status symbol aspect and want a car where I do not have to freak out about every minor dent. Other than that, of course people pick brands based on politics. If Apple's CEO made a statement defending Nethanyahu's operations in Gaza, of course Apple sales would plummet. If a fast-food chain sponsored a campaign to lower the age of consent to five years, they would find that most of their customers would take their business elsewhere. When Putin attacked Ukraine, Europe became a lot less interested in buying his gas, even though the gas had not changed at all.
Most tech CEOs know better than to get openly involved in partisan politics. Musk made the business decision that the goodwill of a Trump administration he had loudly backed before would be worth the hit to his brands, or at least better for him than a Harris administration he had stayed neutral about.
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I'll bite. I have an EV, and it had nothing to do with virtue signalling (and being "green" was little more than an afterthought). I bought an EV because when I was looking for new cars, I tried them out and loved them. The torque, the smooth ride, the lack of vibrations, noise, or smell. I will probably never go back to ICE. The convenience of never having to go to a gas station or get an oil change again really is awesome.
It does of course come with some caveats: I was able to put a charger in my garage. Charging at home is the real game-changer for EVs. And I mostly only drive locally. @100ProofTollBooth is right that I wouldn't choose it for a "go explore remote mountain trails" car. (That said, modern EVs have a 300+ mile range, so it's not that easy to run out of battery without very poor planning.)
Also, I did not buy a Tesla, and again, not because I have Musk Derangement Syndrome. Teslas have the best software, generally, but other than that, a lot of EV makers beat them on comfort and performance (and I just don't like having everything be controlled by a tablet).
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This really is way out of date. For a lot of people in cities and suburbs, 99% of driving tasks are within a hundred miles or so of home and an EV provides lower TCO, the more so the more miles you drive. It especially makes sense for a family that already has an ICE car to use for road trips. I am even aware of militia-adjacent preppers that are high on EVs due to being able to fully sustain them off the grid.
I personally will probably want to replace my 2012 Fusion at some point in the next few years and am waffling between EV or ICE. I don't tend to drive a lot of miles so TCO is probably a wash unless gas prices go way up, but the raw performance of electric and idea of being able to "refuel" in my own garage is really appealing. Having to charge on road trips is the biggest downside.
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I broadly agree. For a certain subset of owners, they've literally labeled themselves as virtue signalers.
I have now seen Tesla's with bumper stickers that read "I bought this before Elon was a Nazi" or something to that effect.
Publicly broadcasting that you feel the need to qualify your previous purchase with a political semi-re-(un?)-justification is a sign of deep commitment to virtue signalling above all other considerations. I have zero tolerance for such people.
Regarding EVs in general, while I am not categorically against them, they still fail a very simply problem for me that gas 100% solves (and has for sometime).
Say that I am in the mountains (because I am!) I want to drive around to some various trails and fishing spots and whatnot. Uh-oh, running low on gas, and I'm 30 miles from a gas station. Thankfully, I've got a 5 gallon gas can on the outside of my truck.
With an EV, I don't believe a "pony battery" is possible? Correct me if I'm wrong. Even more to the point, with US infrastructure construction permitting being what it is, how long would it realistically take to get EV supercharger stations in all of the same rural locations that currently have well functioning gas stations?
This points to another issue with EVs but Tesla's specifically. The people who are really into them are inherently bought in to the idea of complex system dependency. It's hilarious to me that, in Teslas, if your car needs a software update - you can't drive it. If your main dashboard panel breaks for whatever reason, you can't roll your windows down. When planning a road trip, the Tesla software cannot simply plot the fastest route from A to B, but it must factor in recharging stations and battery life. Because of how battery recharging works, you will also likely be driving at between 20 - 50% charge for much of the time. Hilarious. How do we use this complex system we've created? Well, we hack it so that it kind of works in a counter-intuitive way. Also, don't deviate from your pre-planned course to much.
This is the very definition of over-engineered. But, I believe, for many Tesla owners, that is also the very point.
They are showing themselves to be virtue signalers, but that doesn't mean they bought an EV to signal how much they cared about the environment. It just means they claim they wouldn't buy a Tesla in 2025, which is just being sensitive to social stigma; perhaps it also means engaging in political boycotts.
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This could very well be true in the US, but at least in Western Europe, governments subsidise the hell out of EVs through either direct subsidies to the manufacturers and distributers or indirect tax subsidies, and some cities (London, Paris, I assume others) explicitly discourage or even disallow non-EVs from certain areas.
Because of this, if you are in Europe and are:
It's probably in your best interest financially to buy an EV, or at the very least a hybrid.
You could argue this is second-hand virtue signalling, but the end purchaser who will make the decision as to what they buy is probably thinking mostly of practicality. I currently drive a hybrid purely for financial reasons (and since having owned it, I am far more partial to EVs and would consider them in future), and most of the people I know who drive EVs do so either for tax purposes or because they live in an urban area.
And both of these purchasers would be particularly attuned to the inverse-virtue-signalling presently associated with purchasing a Tesla (e.g. I am aware of a European company that has this year taken every Tesla off of its 'approved vehicles' list for company cars, and when pressed on why, they said they didn't want the brand "associated with any political direction"). This means that even if the initial purchase was primarily a financial decision rather than virtue signaling, you can still then be swayed by "Musk man bad".
I've lived in cities with emission norms, and even diesels are allowed in as long as they're relatively new. London and Paris might have gone literally zero emission, though I've never had to drive in either so can't confirm, and they'd be an exception.
Subsidies don't seem to be enough to sway any normie I've met, and the type of person I've met that has an EV still very much fits into the profile we were discussing with Southkraut.
EVs are exempt from the London Congestion Charge (to be replaced with a 50% discount from next year) and get discounts on residents' parking permits in most boroughs. But there isn't anywhere EVs can go where petrol or diesel cars can't. But the direct subsidies to EVs are lower in Europe than in the US - the big difference is that the running cost advantage of an EV is larger because petrol is more expensive here.
Essentially all minicabs on London streets (including Ubers) are hybrids - a quick check of the stats suggests that EVs are about 20% of the UK new car market and hybrids about 25%. Note that fleet purchases are (unusually by global standards) 60% of the market in the UK - this is part of why Tesla's market share is so low - they don't put much effort into fleet sales.
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Fair points. I live in the countryside, so urban concerns are somewhat invisible to me.
That makes sense and in itself reflects a much larger problem: often, policies regarding EV mandates are made with urban areas in mind, where the infrastructure is in the process of being entirely revamped to suit them at the expense of ICE vehicles, whereas once you drive five minutes outside the capital, you can't find a charger, you can't find an EV dealer, and your income drops below the required amount to purchase one in the first place.
Even though my preference is towards EVs for a multitude of reasons, if I lived rural there's no chance in hell I'd use one. Getting off-topic here but it's one of the major reasons I feel EVs have found less uptake in the USA, Canada, and Australia when compared to Europe, which then gets retrofitted to more sensationalist cultural/political lines.
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