Across America, advocates are taking action to take down Tesla — or more accurately, the company’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk, who has a side hustle as the unelected leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, and arguably, the federal government itself.
Since mid-February, peaceful protests have erupted at Tesla dealerships across the country, with activists warning potential shoppers not to buy the “all new Tesla model SS” and grow the fortunes of the world’s richest and most politically influential man. Other less-peaceful protestors vandalized Cybertrucks with swastikas and torched Tesla chargers in protest of Musk’s destructive role in the second Trump administration.
As an advocate for reforming America’s car-dominated transportation system, I’ll admit I’m taking a little pleasure at some of these images, even if it’s pretty clear the protesters’ actions aren’t exactly about automobiles.
Organizers of one Tesla Takedown protest in Delray Beach, Fla. recently referred to Elon Musk’s “products” — namely, the vehicles to which he owes the vast majority of his wealth — as “symbols of unironic Nazism, white supremacy and violence against immigrants, trans people, and the working class,” rather than as instruments of a violent transportation system that slaughters more 40,000 people a year. In interviews, activists are more likely to reference Musk’s role in attempting to axe roughly 100,000 federal employees, rather than his role in attempting to axe public transportation systems, or the dangers of selling “full self driving” vehicles that don’t actually drive themselves.
Suffice it to say, the revolution against automobility has not yet arrived.
But what if more protestors did stop to think about how Elon Musk’s horrific actions in the White House relate to his work as an architect of that violent transportation system — and more broadly, how compulsory car dependence harms all corners of our society, even if its devastating impacts tend to prompt less outrage these days than a chainsaw-waving CEO?
Long before Musk slashed a single federal job, program, or policy in the name of “government efficiency,” the South African engineering/gem-mining scion was pushing a vision for U.S. transportation that purports to put vehicle efficiency before all else, even as experts argue that neither approach actually accomplishes its stated aims.
Just as many economists believe that shrinking the federal government will simply make space for tax cuts for corporations and the ultra-rich, widening highways and building hyperloops have never accomplished their ostensible goals of cutting congestion for average commuters and speeding up cars long-term. But those strategies do enrich a raft of automakers, sprawl-focused developers, and highway (and hyperloop)-builders, whose wealth grows as U.S. residents grow increasingly dependent on the products they sell and the autocentric infrastructure they build.
The other side of the coin, of course, is that Musk’s vision for politics and transportation tend to impoverish everyday Americans — even if they don’t fully realize it. Most Americans still feel entitled to their Social Security and other benefit programs Musk has attacked as “fraudulent” and wasteful, but they’ve been manipulated to believe they aren’t also entitled to high-quality, frequent, affordable public transit and safe active mobility options that are generously subsidized by their tax dollars — even as the car-dominated alternative is blowing massive holes in their budgets month after month.
With the average cost of owning a new vehicle hovering at over $12,000 a year and used vehicle costs not much far behind, nearly half of U.S. households cite the cost of car ownership as the number one reason they can’t save money — and to be clear, the vast majority of those costs flow directly to private corporations and the ultra-rich who run them, rather than, for instance, gas taxes, which have not budged since 1993 and must be constantly supplemented with general funds to keep bridges from collapsing. Despite those sky-high costs, though, a staggering 92 percent of U.S. households own at least one car whether or not they can afford it, because they often have no other way to get to work or accomplish daily tasks.
And that will remain a problem until government starts actually making efficient use of our tax dollars by increasing subsidies to the most efficient forms of mobility and land use, and decreasing subsides to a system of mobility where everyone drives everywhere alone — which is about the least efficient alternative we could possibly choose.
For protesters horrified by Musk’s racism and violent disregard for the safety of vulnerable people, it’s important to note that the burdens of compulsory automobility fall far more heavily on the shoulders of people of color and low-income — and not just financially.
America has the highest rate of traffic deaths of any high-income country overall, but the people who are killed are disproportionately Black, brown, and poor, especially among pedestrians. Those same groups are also more likely to suffer and die from diseases related to pollution, to be denied safe and easy access to jobs and services that can’t be accessed without a car, to lose their homes and businesses to highway construction, and a raft of other harms too numerous to list here.
Transportation officials know this, yet continue to make policy choices that widen those disparities, siting deadly, polluting, divisive highways in neighborhoods where residents have less power and influence to fight back. And in the process, our governments essentially trade those community members’ lives, health, and livelihoods for the profits of autocentric industries who benefit from marginally shorter car and truck commutes — at least until induced demand clogs those highways and they build yet another lane.
As for vulnerable people outside America, it’s important to remember that mass automobility fundamentally depends on massive amounts of mining, drilling, and other resource extraction operations that are rife with human rights abuses, and have been the impetus for a large share of global wars. And that’s before we talk about automobility’s outsized role in the climate crisis, whose devastation is landing disproportionately on the shoulders of the global south.
When we look beyond Elon Musk alone and start thinking about automobility more broadly, it’s easy to understand why President Tump can simultaneously attack the (entirely non-existent) “EV mandate” while essentially filming car commercials for Tesla on the White House lawn.
Both Musk and Trump understand that maintaining automobility (and Musk’s wealth) doesn’t require any more state-sponsored EV tax credits or chargers — neither of which the Tesla CEO seems to support — because cars are so heavily subsidized and centered by virtually every other realm of government that US residents will be forced to keep driving regardless, and many of them will drive electric whether they’re “mandated” to or not.
Having already raked in $31 million from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program and countless more from consumers who took advantage of federal EV tax credits at the Tesla dealership, Musk can pull the ladder up behind him, safe in the knowledge that many of his EV competitors will be devastated by the loss of those federal programs. And the country, meanwhile, will still be built around the automobile, and Tesla’s dealerships and chargers will likely be among the last ones standing for consumers who can stomach buying a “swasticar” if it’s their only real choice to go green.
When Slate writer David Zipper called on Americans to boycott Tesla last month, he correctly argued that “whatever time Musk spends doing damage control [at the car company that made his billions] is time not spent dismantling federal agencies or elevating Europe’s far right.” If the Tesla Takedown protesters continue in the face of Trump’s threats to try them as “domestic terrorists,” they will be doing something very brave.
But if our goal is to truly confront “a totalitarian system with fascist traits” — as researcher Robert Braun once described automobility, in an echo of how Musk’s vision for America is often described — I’d argue that we should set our ambitions higher than “creating a vote of no confidence in [Musk] from the shareholders,” as one protester told CNN was their primary goal.
Yes, we should protest Tesla as a lever to shift power away from the head of DOGE. But we should also protest every automaker, road builder, autocentric developer, and powerful person who has worked so tirelessly to put automobility at the beating heart of our culture. And that protest can start with something as simple as getting on the bus.
