Late last month, a guerrilla advertising campaign for a new car appeared on the back-lit vitrines of bus shelters in East London. Wrapped around an image of a man sieg-heiling, Nazi-style, from the open sunroof of a white sedan, the caption read: “Goes From 0-1939 in three seconds. Tesla. The Swasticar.”
Funny and bitingly accurate.
Tesla, owned by the world’s richest man and unofficial Vice-President Elon Musk, is now regarded in some circles as the anti-woke brigade’s vehicle of choice.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Teslas were purchased—proudly!—by environmentally-minded Democrats like Stephen Colbert and Leonardo DiCaprio. Now, it’s the car of choice for Kanye West.
Drive a Cybertruck in liberal enclaves like New York, Los Angeles, London, or Paris, and expect to be judged harshly. At best, you’ll be taken for a Trump supporter. At worst, you’ll be on the receiving end of a hand signal from a fellow Tesla driver that, not that long ago, could have gotten you both cancelled. Park your Model Y on the street? You’re basically begging to be vandalized.
Musk just can’t help himself when it comes to spreading his megalomaniac, dangerous views. (And he does it while resembling a cocaine dealer straight out of 1990s Moscow.) Some now consider him to be the patron saint of Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland and the UK’s similarly positioned Reform UK party.
This is very bad for business, especially in Europe, where memories of World War II tend to be more acute. Even among Tesla’s most loyal customers, buyers’ remorse is spreading like a virus, and new-car sales are slumping. In January of this year, Tesla sold just 9,945 vehicles in Europe, down 45% from January 2024’s total of 18,161. Its decline is significant in Germany, where sales have fallen by 59.5% to just 1,277 units in January. In February, Tesla sales were down 37.9% in Norway, 63.4% in France, and 75.4% in Spain. And this was before Musk’s circus act really ramped up.
California was once a golden state for Tesla’s customer base, but there, the brand has recently reported its fifth consecutive quarterly decline. Tesla registrations fell 7.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2024, contributing to an overall 11.6 percent decline in that year.
We should not expect those numbers to improve. All over the world, Tesla owners are trying to unload their once-prized possessions. A recent study in the Netherlands by the media company EenVandaag found that nearly three in ten Dutch Tesla owners are considering selling. Experts predict the secondhand Tesla market to become flooded and prices to drop even further.
“As a Tesla driver you were always the fool: the Green party voter, the world savior, the CO2 guy,” a German Tesla owner told Germany’s Capital.de media. “But now you’re in a category that’s no longer funny.” Graffiti on the side of a Tesla Gigafactory in Berlin featuring the words “Heil Tesla” hasn’t helped.
In Poland, the country’s tourism minister has called on its citizens a second time to boycott Tesla after Musk’s appearance at the AfD rally in February. A left-leaning Facebook friend (and a long-time evangelist for Musk’s vehicles) suddenly announced that he had sold his car and, just in case anyone missed it, now identifies as “no longer a Tesla owner.”
In Manhattan, the owner of a street-parked Cybertruck recently returned to discover the vehicle’s door spray-painted with a Swastika.
Musk has caused the downfall of his public company singlehandedly. Always proud to boast that Tesla does not indulge in conventional advertising and maintains a “$0 marketing budget,” the company prefers to rely on the voice of its founder—mainly through his posts on X—for publicity and promotion. In the past year or so, this hasn’t worked out so well.
Tesla’s post-election stock price soared to $480; last week, it was hovering around $282. Musk himself is still worth a staggering $353 billion—on paper—but surely he could afford to hire a public relations expert. (Ideally one with expertise in crisis management.) The more he talks, the more money he, and his shareholders, stand to lose.
But Tesla’s position is not all that unique. Nearly every 20th century automobile manufacturer doing business in Germany and Eastern Europe—including Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Porsche, and Mercedes-Benz—was somehow tainted by its relationship with the Third Reich. And they all managed to orchestrate a miraculous recovery by rebranding and redeeming themselves in the post-war period. (It probably didn’t hurt that so few people knew the nuts and bolts of their involvement with the Nazi party. Twitter was not exactly a thing in 1939.)
Ferdinand Porsche and Hitler’s “VolksWagen”—people’s car—ultimately produced the Beetle, the ultimate Nazi-nation ride. Somehow, that car mutated into the hippies’ choice of transport in the 60s and 70s.
Musk has reverse-engineered that narrative. When Tesla began producing its first models—the Roadster in 2008, followed by the Model S sedan in 2012—owning one was a performative badge of honor. The design was clunky, the finishes were generally appalling, the plastics tacky and the tech was babyish. But the plug–and-play Tesla did look modern and egalitarian, aiming its zero-emissions promise and off-grid lifestyle attitude squarely at wealthy, Coldplay-loving Democrats. (Remember that Musk was one of them until fairly recently; he voted for his first Republican during a special election in Texas in 2022.)
The gas-guzzling rednecks and V8 yahoos hated them. But perhaps seeing an opportunity, Musk executed a u-turn, abandoning his core customers and driving his vehicles to the far right.
Perhaps this was fated to happen to a man possibly named after a character, Elon, who was predicted to colonize Mars in a 1952 novel by Nazi missile expert Wernher von Braun. Musk’s maternal grandparents, the Canadian doctors Wyn Fletcher and Joshua Haldeman, openly had Nazi politics.
Musk denies that his two inauguration salutes were “Sieg Heils,” but he still finds himself in an industrial and political quandary. The world’s best-known EV manufacturer is aligned with a president and his entourage who floated notions that wind farms cause cancer, can’t seem to get enough of fracking, and have adopted “drill baby, drill” as a battle cry.
Who knows. Maybe the Fox News types will start snapping up these bargain-basement Model Xs. But for the time being, the MAGA base still aspires to a Dodge Charger, not a DOGE pick-up.
Driving a Tesla in 2015 was the automotive equivalent of sticking it to the man. But now, in increasingly surreal 2025, Musk has become that guy. And he’s not a very nice one, either.
Meanwhile, I recently came across this ad on Facebook marketplace. “Tesla Swasticar for sale. Low mileage. Far right hand drive. Large sunroof for parades. Great rally car.”
Simon Mills is an editor at Wallpaper and a writer at The Times of London
