> spiral has much less to do with fundamentals than politics

Tesla’s brand has become trash in a year. I have a neighbour who had PowerWalls installed a few years ago. He spray painted over the branding last year because it was embarrassing. (I live in Wyoming.)

Your neighbor is weird

This isn't weird, really. Rational people tend to not like being associated with fascists, and with Elon at the helm Tesla is strongly associated with American Fascism at the moment.

> Rational people tend to not like being associated with fascists

This is fair, but I don’t even think it’s that. They just don’t want everyone walking into their garage to immediately associate them with Musk. This is true for folks on the left, who call out his fascism. But it’s also true if someone with MAGA leanings walks in.

My personal favorite is the Tesla apology bumper sticker. I want to signal I care, but I only care about 20$. Love the virtue signaling while driving round a 50k$ donation to Elon.

I have people posting long apologies on LinkedIn about how they needed a new car but they disagree with (insert rant). It’s embarrassing they even post it. No one on LinkedIn even needs to or cares to know what car you drive, it’s just platitude virtue signaling

> and with Elon at the helm Tesla is strongly associated with American Fascism at the moment

That's overblown. Telsa is strongly associated with an idiot who's so immature and stupid that he's managed to annoy pretty much everyone.

FWIW, I’ve covered the branding on everything in my house. I don’t need my home to be advertising corporate brands to me/family/guests.

For what it’s worth, I was putting in solar panels with battery back-up, and PowerWalls were the least-bulky option, and I killed it last year because again, I don’t want to have something that partisan (and frankly toxic) so close.

For a decade? The politics has been a recent problem. For a decade though Tesla has had serious production problems that were dismissable under "but they're ahead".

Except it hasn't happened - they still have trouble with QA and building enough cars cheaply enough, and now the market has caught up with them.

And then into this mix, Musk decided to publicly side with the political aisle which hates his core customer base and his core product line.

And more importantly his core customer base hates his chosen politics.