[DilettanteQuant]

Many people in the comments claiming to be liberals who wont buy from Tesla due to Elon. What exactly do you dislike about him, and why is punishing Elon by boycotting Tesla worth slowing the transition to sustainable transportation?

[dagw]

slowing the transition to sustainable transportation?

How is buying an electric Not-Tesla slowing down the transition to sustainable transportation compared to buying a Tesla?

[DilettanteQuant]

The only Western automaker that can produce electric cars without losing massive amounts of money. Only Western automaker that produces EVs at scale. By far the leader in terms of technology and efficiency in the industry. Best range/dollar vehicles you can buy in north America.

A couple Chinese automakers like BYD and Xpeng might survive the next couple years, they did it by relentlessly copying Tesla.

[rsynnott]

> why is punishing Elon by boycotting Tesla worth slowing the transition to sustainable transportation?

Are you under the impression that Tesla is the only company who makes electric cars, or something? They're about 10-15% of the global market.

[Mawr]

Cars aren't sustainable transportation in the first place.

[red-iron-pine]

single biggest source of microplastics and PFAS is road and tire debris from high volumes of cars and trucks

[DilettanteQuant]

This is a major problem on the scale of carbon induced global warming, deforestation, and other types of environmental pollution? Isn't the solution, presumably some new type of tire, likely to be applicable to all vehicle types? gas electric or otherwise.

[johneth]

> What exactly do you dislike about him

Everything. Guy's a prick.

Specifically, he's a huge narcissist surrounding himself with yes men to stroke his ego. Not a good environment for push back (resulting in obvious failures like the Cybertruck, Twitter-to-X rebranding, 'FSD is ready!', The Boring Company, etc.)

> why is punishing Elon by boycotting Tesla worth slowing the transition to sustainable transportation?

Even if we take the Elon factor out of the equation and just decide not to buy a Tesla for any other reason, it isn't 'slowing the transition to sustainable transportation' because I can buy a (much of the time) cheaper, better build quality, modern electric car from Rivian, Hyundai, BMW, Volkswagen, Audi, BYD, Volvo, Ford, Lucid, Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Chrysler, Fiat, GMC, Honda, Jaguar, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Polestar, Porsche, Ram, etc.

[DilettanteQuant]

Why does it matter? He's not particularly more narcissistic than any other CEO. Steve Jobs? I'm generally not concerned about the specific personality type of the CEO or any other employee at a company when I buy a product.

Tesla is clearly the industry leader in terms of volume, technology, and efficiency. The market wouldn't exist without them. Most of those companies your listing can't/don't produce in volume because they have massive negative margin and range/dollar is inferior to Tesla. Only a few companies are in a place where they can make money on selling electric vehicles such as BYD and they did it through relentlessly copying Tesla.