‘Rude drivers will swerve in my lane’: are Tesla owners paying the price for Musk hate?

Tesla lost at least one customer this weekend, after Alyssa Milano tweeted that she had returned her model for a Volkswagen electric vehicle, prompting jokes from Elon Musk and conservative commentators about the German manufacturer's Nazi origin story. Milano said she had ditched Tesla due to Musk's ownership of Twitter.

While Tesla owners do not seem to be following the actor's move en masse, some note that they have been on the receiving end of road rage directed toward their vehicle choice.

Although there's no official data to prove that Tesla drivers get more hate, an Axios report from August found that Iowa's "Tesla drivers are routinely heckled, cut off in traffic, and blocked from charging stations." Many put the blame on the company's CEO, Elon Musk, and the never-ending news cycle devoted to his frenzied Twitter takeover. A July poll from the research analytics firm OpinionScience found that 54% of respondents viewed Musk "negatively" - and some Tesla drivers believe they are suffering the impact of his reputation.

Tesla drivers interviewed by the Guardian say they have experienced anti-Tesla sentiment, but mostly from those who hate electric vehicles rather than Musk specifically. "Random rude drivers will swerve in my lane to yell at me, or turn on a heavy diesel exhaust that blows black smoke," Paul Albertson, who lives in Beaverton, Oregon, told the Guardian. It never happens when he drives his two other cars, a vintage 1948 Chevy and a 2014 Traverse. The culprits are most often men driving "larger pick-up trucks", he said.

John Shevelew doesn't notice too much road rage at home in York, Pennsylvania, where he is president of the state's Tesla Owners Club. Things change when he drives through the south. "I go to Texas a lot to see my daughter in Austin, and in Arkansas, Mississippi, those places, I run into, let's say, less-than-friendly looks," he said. "You get someone in a big diesel pickup truck who likes to express their dissatisfaction with the idea of an electric car."

Laura Kennedy, who also lives in Pennsylvania, agrees. "It's almost always a guy in a pickup truck [who does something]," she said. "I don't think I've ever been flipped off in my life as much as I have in the past year or so."

Teslas are common in the Bellevue, Washington, area, where Theresa Ramsdell lives and has owned two models since 2016. "People cut us off on the freeway, give us the finger, yell at me through the windows," she said. "A couple of people have not exactly tried to push me off the road, but drive real close to the side of my car and smile. It's happened to me twice going at 65 mph and it's scary."

Marc Geller, spokesperson for the Electric Vehicle Association and a Tesla owner himself, has owned a battery-powered car of some sort since 2000. He said that road rage traditionally came from rightwingers who see the electric vehicle drivers as crunchy liberals.

But now that Musk has become something of a conservative hero - telling his followers to vote Republican in the midterms and reinstating Donald Trump's Twitter account - he's a foe to many electric vehicle fans, too.

"There's an irony here in that Teslas have long been a hate magnet for various reasons," Geller said. "They were the subject of road rage because they represented the environment and were perceived as the vehicular embodiment of that culture war. But now here we are, and some folks on the left are having a knee-jerk reaction because Elon Musk has taken this ominous turn to the political right, so now they're throwing the same bricks."

One 22-year-old man who spoke to the Guardian and just co-signed with his parents on a Tesla calls the car "the best purchase" he's ever made. Minus one caveat: people keep cutting him off.

"I noticed the road rage within the first week I got it," said the man, who lives in Thousand Oaks, California, and didn't want to be publicly outed as a Tesla driver. "I'll just be driving the same speed I had in my old Ford Fusion, but they'll cut in front of me and drive really slow, or prevent me from switching lanes. On city streets I'll go the speed limit and cars leaving parking lots will decide to cut in, making me stomp on the brakes. That's happened eight times this month."