The only issue is that car manufacturers are doing the same thing. Make it look like a Tesla, but it doesn't have an engine so we don't need to worry about anything else, but shiny luxury looking. And now it's an EV. It's unfortunate Tesla set the standard.
Normies don't give a fuck about his politics. There is a shockingly large contingent of people out there who still think he's actually smart. This is everything to do with how the build quality of Teslas is absolute dog shit and the Cybertruck has a negative stigma that sticks to the whole company like a smell that won't go away.
My MIL is one of these people. It doesn't matter how many times we explain to her, with evidence, that he's a moron. It's like she hits herself with the Men in Black memory eraser after every conversion and next thing you know she's back to saying "well all geniuses are a little bit eccentric and he's the smartest man alive so of course he's a bit strange." It's so exhausting.
There is a shockingly large contingent of people out there who still think he's actually smart. This is everything to do with how the build quality of Teslas is absolute dog shit and the Cybertruck has a negative stigma that sticks to the whole company like a smell that won't go away.
How does Joe Average square the circle that is a super genius but also that bazingamobiles are janky trash?
Back in the day Elon was an asshole lib. Nowadays he probably openly supports Trump bc he wants to be cool with the kids (people who were born in the 1980 - 1990 and are 10/20 years younger than him).
Democrats: "We'll do what it takes to fight fascism!'
Me: "If you aggressively pushed for cars to have direct selling - you'd damage the GOP's base of car dealerships and you'd give yourself serious green energy cred because EV firms want to sell direct."
Democrats: "We can't do that!"
Me: "So - your plan is to continue to campaign and fundraise off your 'fascism!' shtick but actually not do anything about it, huh."
This is probably much more the result of Tesla's old model lineup and FSD still being a fake product. Their only new model is the CyberTruck. Their second newest model is the ModelY that was released in 2020, but is based on the 2017 Model 3.
Wasn't this the whole reason for Elon Musk buying Twitter?
The writing was on the wall that Tesla was taking major hits, and Elon wanted to take his money out without signaling to the market that there was anything wrong, and needed a place to put the money (i.e. twitter)
only remaining plausible defense of this is that he had to become an epic groyper icon for the frothing fascists comprising some large percentage of this country to get over their weird petro-masculinity and consider EVs. Not that this solves climate change but at least it helps slightly.