In November, Tesla sales fell 35.5 percent compared with the same month in 2023, according to Automotive News. By contrast, Ford, Honda, Kia and Hyundai had record EV sales in November. Tesla’s total US sales from January through October fell 7.3 percent compared with last year, and they fell 2.3 percent worldwide.
It’s been dubbed “The Musk Factor.” Once, Musk could count on his bravado, his fervent male fan base, and minimal EV competition to keep sales growing. His introductions of new cars were more like pep rallies than business events.
But for certain segments of the driving public, he’s become his car company’s worst enemy. And meanwhile, the less politically toxic competition is offering more choices than before. Tesla had 80 percent of the US electric vehicle market in 2018, but that share fell below 50 percent this year for the first time.
Douglas Levy, a communications consultant in San Francisco, told me he came “this close” to buying a used Tesla from Hertz. But “the onslaught of hate, abuse, and misinformation on X angered me, especially with Musk’s hypocritical comments about protecting free speech,” Levy said. “I went from preferring Teslas when renting to shunning them.”
One Los Angeles attorney and car buff, who asked me not to use his name, said he regularly recommended Teslas to friends shopping for EVs. Now he says they’re turned off by Musk and shopping instead for Rivians or traditional brands such as Mercedes and Hyundai.
Margaret Gillard, a small business owner in Washington, D.C., bought a Kia Nero for her kids to use, instead of a Tesla, and shut down her X account, too. “I won’t support anything he does,” Gillard said via email.
Gillard says several Tesla-owning friends have purchased anti-Musk bumper stickers that read “I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy,” which I’ve also spotted in Ann Arbor.
According to The New York Times, buyers also can choose from stickers including the universal “no” symbol of a red-bordered circle with a slash through Musk’s name and another that says, “Anti-Elon Tesla Club.”
Musk has infamous company. Throughout automotive history, car companies and their leaders have been derided — and boycotted — for their politics.
From 1919 through 1927, Henry Ford fiercely attacked Jews in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, dictating screeds to writers who turned them into editorials.
After being denounced and boycotted by a variety of groups, including the Anti-Defamation League, Ford issued an apology and shut down the paper. But in the process, Ford’s company lost its market dominance. By the 1930s, General Motors passed Ford to become the largest American car company, and it remains so today.
Meanwhile, generations of American Jewish buyers refused to consider German brands, especially Volkswagen, because of the company’s ties to Adolf Hitler, who laid the cornerstone at its factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, in 1938. (Hitler, incidentally, revered Ford.)
In the late 20th century, some veterans who fought in the Pacific shunned Japanese auto companies when their cars appeared in the United States. Now, Volvo and other manufacturers are targets of Palestinian activists, who say their machinery is being used to displace residents in the West Bank.
The anger at Musk couldn’t come at a worse time for Tesla, which is seeing its unquestioned dominance of the EV market shaken by its own missteps as well as heightened competition.
Its futuristic Cybertruck, which looks like it was sketched on butcher paper with a grease pencil and a ruler, supposedly received 2 million preorders when Tesla began taking reservations in 2023. But analysts estimate that Tesla had only sold about 28,000 trucks through October.
Things are so bad that earlier this month, Tesla shut down its Cybertruck factory in Austin, Texas, for three days with no notice and told employees to stay home. (They were still paid.)
Musk isn’t personally suffering from the derogatory attention. According to Bloomberg, he’s become the first person in history to accumulate a fortune of $400 billion. Tesla shares also are setting new highs, gaining 65 percent since Election Day, on the expectation that Musk’s tightness with Trump will lead to looser regulations that will benefit the carmaker.
Musk has far bigger concerns now than whether people like him. In fact, he’s said he has no problem being hated. He’s been shadowing Trump at meetings with world leaders and preparing for duties as coleader of the country’s new Department of Government Efficiency.
But as Ford proved almost a century ago, no company stays on top for long when the man in charge becomes notorious.
Micheline Maynard, a contributing writer for Globe Ideas, is the author of “The End of Detroit: How the Big Three Lost Their Grip on the American Car Market.”