I think they were facing a rough 5+ years because their products aren’t great. Want a three row SUV? Tesla makes one, but it doesn’t have a steering wheel.

They win on efficiency (miles / kwh), but that’s about it at this point. Other manufacturers have better interiors (knobs and build quality, car play / android auto), form factors, etc.

Either that, or Elon would have been a serious problem for the company. Since they’re happening at the same time, it’s going to be rough.

> The CEO did a Nazi salute on stage. It's on video, and it's very, very obvious.

I think the only people who care about this are people who care about politics in the first place or didn't already like Elon, which isn't everyone and probably not the majority.

Whilst Elon has some blame for Tesla's bad brand image, competition in Europe has made it so if you go Tesla your basically paying a premium for the brand and that's it, Tesla's in Europe iirc have self driving capability much less than the US.

Apparently a nazi salute is a funny joke in the US. Very much not so in Europe.

It doesn't seem to be going down very well in the US either.

One factor is that even if you think Musk was just mucking about or misunderstood, there is still the embarrassment of other people thinking your car choice endorses that.

Note that GP used "whilst" which is British English, and previous posts seem Euro-centric and talk about renaming "American football." So it sounds like this person is Europe's problem.

The post had a number of grammatical errors too, so if "whilst" we're at it, should we criticize all of European education? Please don't post low-effort negative nationalism. It's cheap and the subject (the richest person alive is apparently a nazi) is a serious matter.

In Europe it's absolutely a majority. Musk is widely despised now. And this used to be a big market for Tesla.

I live in a red state. My Trump voting friends here call Elon Trump's nazi boy and in a very derogatory way. A lot of people are assuming Nazi behavior is way more accepted by Trump voters than it actually is (or maybe we're a different kind of red here than in the deep south).

Deep South reporting in. On the exceedingly rare occasion that white supremacists gather in public down here they're outnumbered somewhere between 10-100:1 pretty consistently. I'm not saying racial attitudes aren't what they are down here, but nobody much has any time for the Klan around these parts.

> I think the only people who care about this are people who care about politics in the first place or didn't already like Elon, which isn't everyone and probably not the majority.

... You think the majority of people don't care about Nazi salutes? I mean, certainly if we're talking Europe, yeah, sorry, the majority of people do care about Nazi salutes.

I think, also, that the kind of sneering, what would you call it, implausible deniability maybe, thing the US far-right like to do where they do something outrageously and then smugly deny that they did it, works less well in Europe (I'm not sure why Americans are so tolerant of it, tbh).

I mean, it's particularly unfortunate for Tesla that Musk decided to go crazy in a very public way _right now_ (he's been like this forever, of course, but until recently you had to be Very Online to notice; it wasn't on the news every day); it's at a time when it is, in any case, facing increased pressure from competitors. There's some aspect of a combination of factors; likely neither on their own would produce such a large effect.