[filoleg]

TIL there are people who actually make their car-purchasing decisions based on what people on twitter say on entirely unrelated matters.

And yeah, given how widespread Teslas are where I live (if stopped at any traffic light in the city, you will see at least 2 Teslas waiting), I can confirm that absolutely no one cares.

[spacemadness]

Today you learned that some people try to make purchasing decisions that aren’t in great misalignment with their values?

[filoleg]

Nope, I always knew it was a thing. Just like there are some people who go full-on FreeBSD or categorically refuse to use non-free software. Richard Stallman exists, after all, and is a celebrity.

And I also knew, for quite a while, that positions analogous to that of Stallman should never be taken at face value as something that the general public would care to even know about, let alone support or follow through. And it isn't because I am jaded or don't have faith in people, quite the opposite. It is because average people as a group tend to be pretty good at (perhaps blindly) filtering things into the "practically matters" and "doesn't ultimately matter" buckets.

In relation to this specific scenario, despite the negative reaction to my initial comment on HN and Elon's public perception trending increasingly negative, recent Tesla car sales numbers (which keep increasing) seem to only support my point. People online might loudly say XYZ, but once you look at the numbers that matter, the reality looks a bit differently.

[hn_throwaway_99]

> And yeah, given how widespread Teslas are where I live (if stopped at any traffic light in the city, you will see at least 2 Teslas waiting), I can confirm that absolutely no one cares.

Well, that's obviously false give the existence proofs in these comments. But more to the point, I only went from "Ugh, Elon is so fucking annoying, I just wish he would STFU" to "I will actively try to convince anyone I know to never do anything that would contribute to his wealth" in the past year with all the Twitter BS. I'm sure the vast, vast majority of Teslas you see on the road now were ordered before then.

[filoleg]

> Well, that's obviously false give the existence proofs in these comments

Sorry, I meant in real life, not on HN. If you judge reality by what comments here say, you would believe that the average person thinks of TikTok as the greatest evil and that american big tech is out there to violate their privacy to entrap them for life, which is why everyone and their grandma runs an Arch or Ubuntu distro.

This is what I call a niche flavor of a terminally online take.

[hn_throwaway_99]

Your statement was "I can confirm that absolutely no one cares."

Last I checked, I exist in real life, not just on HN, and I'm guessing many of the responders here do as well.

I agree, I have no idea how common this sentiment is, which is why I said so in my original comment. Still, it's a valid hypothesis that the people most likely to be turned off by Elon to the point of avoiding Tesla are also the people who were (at least previously) most likely to want to buy an EV.

[filoleg]

I appreciate your take, I really do. But I feel like you are just hyperfocusing on figures of speech.

Of course, there will be some people in real life who genuinely hold those takes. People on HN are real people after all, just like people on reddit/twitter/etc are (bots and astroturfing aside), and their opinions are real.

When I said "no one in real life", I meant that you wouldn't find that opinion heavily represented outside of those online communities, in a way that you would even know about it in real life. The only comments I got on that purchasing decision (and I got tons of those) were either asking about the charging situation or whether i regret getting white interior (answer: no, i don't, because whichever material they use is extremely resistant to dirt/stain and is very easy to clean/maintain).

It is kind of difficult to imagine many people (at least where I live in PNW) to really care, given that just outside of my window as i was writing this reply, I saw 2 model Ys, 1 model 3, and 1 model X pass by. I don't have the stats on hand, but if someone told me that Teslas were in the top 5 of the most sold new car brands in the state (along with Subaru, of course), I would be able to believe it.

Sidenote: I am very pleasantly impressed with the direction Hyundai is taking with their Ioniq line, and I definitely want to try it out.

[jsnell]

It's like two days since it was widely reported that Tesla's net approval ratings in consumer polls are now negative (drop from 6% at the start of the year to -1% now).

So clearly the attitudes in real life with real people have changed recently. The number of cars you see on the roads is, incidentally, a trailing indicator. If literally all sales of Teslas stopped now you'd still see them in the wild with the same frequency for years.

[filoleg]

Those approval ratings were gathered by Kelley Blue Book, and even they themselves pointed out that other reports disagree. As well as that the recent slippage in brand perception recorded last month had exactly zero negative effects on sales [0].

> The number of cars you see on the roads is, incidentally, a trailing indicator. If literally all sales of Teslas stopped now you'd still see them in the wild with the same frequency for years.

Correct, but their recently posted sales numbers should alleviate that concern.

0. https://www.kbb.com/car-news/is-tesla-brand-loyalty-starting...

[hn_throwaway_99]

> But I feel like you are just hyperfocusing on figures of speech.

Sure, I agree with that, just meant to point out that at least some people care, we just don't know how many or if it's in any way material to Tesla's overall numbers. Also think it's worth emphasizing that the number of Teslas on the road today isn't a good marker, given that Musk's most alienating behavior has only ramped up in the past year or so.

[filoleg]

In full agreement with you on both of these points.