Are all Tesla drivers crazy?

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Are all Tesla drivers crazy? Simon Strauss • 9 hours • 4 minutes reading time In this Intouchables: Trump and Musk For some time now, a slightly modified version of the old Prinzen anthem “My Bicycle” has been circulating in kindergartens and better-behaved schoolyards. Almost imperceptibly, the name of a single car brand has been replaced: “Every booger drives an Opel/ Every monkey drives a Ford/ Every idiot drives a Porsche/ Every asshole drives an Audi Sport/ Every nutcase drives a Tesla/ Every idiot drives a Jaguar/ Only connoisseurs ride bicycles/ And always get there faster.” The fact that Manta drivers are supposed to be bigger nuts than Jaguar racers was already doubtful in 1991, the year the song was released – even if Til Schweiger probably contributed a lot to the rating with his stupid film that came out the same year. On the other hand, Tesla drivers being called idiots in 2024 and at the latest after the outcome of the American elections would certainly be justified. The only question is: will they really be idiots? Or rather: do they feel like idiots? The idiot question When the first Tesla Roadster with a battery made of lithium-ion battery cells came onto the market in 2008, nobody would have seriously expected that just a few years later no other car brand in the world would be more closely associated with the word "future" than this one. The rapid rise of the Californian garage company to become a global giga-company has a lot to do with PayPal founder and Tesla main investor Elon Musk. The idiot question is also directly related to him. The crucial question is: what kind of car am I getting into if I get into a Tesla today, in November 2024? Unlike BMW, Mercedes or Dacia, where the names and world views of the bosses are largely unknown to the wider world population, Elon Musk has done a lot in recent years to ensure that he is clearly associated with certain value judgments and political attitudes. This does not just mean his tangible advocacy, advertising and, most recently, even dubious spending of money for Donald Trump, to whom he pledged his profitable support immediately after the failed assassination attempt on July 13, 2024. And next to whom he now sat at his victory party in Florida. In steel storms Musk took his cue from his former Paypal colleague Peter Thiel early on. Especially when it comes to his basic socio-political assumptions and intellectual sources of influence. The news that caused waves in November 2021 that Elon Musk revealed himself to be an enthusiastic Ernst Jünger reader is unforgettable. In a tweet addressed to the military history-minded podcaster Dan Carlin, Musk enthusiastically praised Jünger's "In Stahlgewittern" as a "great book" in front of his 62 million followers. This was a surprise for all those who had previously seen Musk as the green savior of the world with an enlightened conscience. When Musk bought Twitter a short time later to protect what he saw as the endangered freedom of expression, and was the first to allow conspiracy theorists and strategic liars back in, the image of Musk began to change for good. Today, two years later, there can really be no doubt that the dazzling aura of the South African college dropout, who has since risen to become a world-conquering revolutionary in the auto industry, inventor of his own spaceship program and neurotechnological pioneer of a future world, is a die-hard libertarian with a right-wing conservative partial identity. Musk's intellectual drive structure is not only characterized by the futuristic inventiveness that has so often been attributed to him, the "new Leonardo". He is also infected by the perception-altering poison of hate that makes him see the devil on earth in the "woke left". It is precisely because Musk thinks not only in progressive but also in arch-metaphysical categories and categorizes the "woke" in the Old Testament sense as a plague that brings disaster to humanity that he is also a neo-right revolutionary. One who suddenly stands with his legs apart under a highway bridge on the Mexican border and holds the microphone to a local sheriff so that he can report on loss of control and mass immigration of criminals. Effect of the worldview All of this should be recalled once again in order to answer the question: What kind of car am I getting into when I get into a Tesla? Interestingly, so far we have heard nothing about ideologically motivated anti-Tesla campaigns or even calls for a boycott. Apparently no one who drives up in a Model S is associated with reactionary ideas. This is astonishing in our otherwise moral society that is so ready for censorship.