I first leased a Tesla Model 3 in Dec 2019. It was the fastest and smoothest car I had ever driven! It was so quiet and had so much zip. Its interior was elegantly sparse – it had just a single large display and two thumbwheels on the steering wheel. I knew something about EVs since I had already been leasing a Chevy Volt, and it was a distinct step up:

I could recharge it at home, and was able to put plenty of miles on it overnight with just a 110V cord. If I did need to charge on the road, the Tesla public chargers were far better than the “standard” CCS chargers. Tesla’s just worked when you plugged them in, while every other system needed a phone app that failed to connect a lot of the time. The car had fun extras, like the Emissions Test that made fart noises when you moved on a seat. The kids keeled over at that. It had a Santa mode where the turn signals made jingle jangles and the surrounding cars turned into reindeer.

As time went on, the honeymoon wore off. It was annoying to not have a fan control or a windshield wiper control, and the automatic wiper worked really badly because they skimped on the rain sensor. There was no blind spot detection – you had to look to the right at the screen to see cars to your near left. Every other car puts a yellow light on the outer edge of the mirrors if something is near. The other warnings were way too conservative, and beeped at you all the time. The range dropped a lot when the heat was on. The snazzy recessed door handles would freeze shut in the winter. The sparse interior started to look cheap instead of elegant.

All of those are normal nitpicks. It’s normal to be excited by a big new purchase, whether it’s a car or a house, and normal to become disenchanted over time.

What wasn’t normal was the increasingly nasty behavior of the company’s leader, Elon Musk. He had always had an odd affect, but as an engineer I know lots of people who are on the spectrum. His talk of colonizing Mars was ridiculous, but was also normal SF fan blather. But in 2018 he called the head of the Thai cave rescue group “a pedo guy”. That was straight slander, but it was an offhand comment when his own approach to the rescue was rejected. He was also starting to flirt with Trump, unlike everyone else in tech.

When the pandemic hit in 2020, his true self started to come out. He raged at having to close his California car plant, and defied the state public health orders. Lots of news started coming out about sexual and racial harassment at his factories, and safety hazards at SpaceX. He started making outlandish claims about self-driving, and about the Cybertruck, and the Tesla Semi. The Boring Company was going to displace public transit, and Neuralink brain implants would transport us to VR heaven. What?

Then he bought Twitter in 2022. It had already been weaponized to tilt the election towards Trump in 2016, and he thought that their attempts to rein that in were too much. He was already one of its leading users, and decided to make it his mouth-piece. He babbled about censorship and promptly turned it into a Nazi bar.

My original lease was up in Dec 2022, and I was torn about what to do. I wanted to stay electric because once you drive on juice you’ll never go back. I didn’t much like the other EV options. GM was the only real competitor, and they had canceled the quite nice Volt and even its full EV replacement, the Bolt. No one else had good charging networks. So I re-upped with Tesla, getting a low-end Model 3 to save some money:

By early 2024, Musk was off the deep end. He speculated on Twitter that the guy who tried to murder the husband of Nancy Pelosi with a hammer was actually Paul Pelosi’s gay lover. JFC. I looked into doing an early lease termination on the Tesla. The phone app has a page for that, where it estimates the current value of the car on the used market versus its value at the end of the lease, and charges you the difference. They wanted $15,000. That was a lot more than it would cost to just pay off the lease. The value of used Teslas was already plummeting. I couldn’t see giving them that much of my money, and so found the monetary limit of my political outrage.

Then came the election in Nov 2024. The worst person to ever hold the office of US President was elected, again. George W. Bush was actually a worse President, what with missing 9/11, getting the US into two unwinnable wars, killing thousands in Katrina, and letting the fin-bros steal trillions in the Great Recession, but he wasn’t personally a criminal. Musk helped Trump quite directly by pouring money all over his campaigns and using Twitter to create a tsunami of disinformation about Harris and the Dems.

Then came DOGE. It turned out that Musk didn’t want to just cosplay being a Nazi, he genuinely wanted to destroy the country. His first target was USAID, which he illegally seized and even stripped the letters off the building. Literally millions will die without its medical and food assistance. He then started cutting a swath through every federal agency, firing people at random and seizing sensitive data for use in extortion and actual treason. Minutes after his minions broke into the legal databases of the NLRB, Russian hackers started attacking its systems using seized passwords.

He claimed that this was all being done in the name of efficiency, effectiveness, and debt relief. Incredibly, many commentators took him seriously, and said earnestly that everyone was in favor of that. No wonder he has such open contempt for the press. How gullible do you have to be to think that killing USAID, which is less than 1% of the federal budget, is being done to reduce the deficit?

Anyway, by February the Tesla lease termination was down to only $5000. My outrage budget could handle that. I finally put down a deposit on a new car, a Lucid Air Pure. The Lucid is also made in America, is the most efficient EV on the market, and has half again the interior space of the Model 3. They denied my lease application. I had an outstanding payment to GM for the Volt from five years ago, and it ruined my credit rating. It took me two months to clear that up. I had to mail a paper check to GM in Arizona, because they’re not yet in the 21st century. They actually cashed it and then lost track of it. No more GM cars for me. In the meantime the price of the Lucid I wanted went up by 15%.

So I dropped back nine yards and went for the Consumer Reports recommendation, a BMW i4 xDrive40:

Unlike the Tesla, it has a sunroof, a heads-up display, a dashboard display, buttons for the wipers and fans, actual blind-spot detection, Apple Car Play, and decent upholstery. Unlike Lucid, it has an excellent repair history. Like the Tesla, they give you a $7500 EV credit, even though it’s not made in the US and so doesn’t get the federal tax break. They also gave a $1000 “pirate” bonus for switching from Tesla. It turns out to cost only about 20% more than the low-end Model 3, yet drives and rides far more nicely. My daughter always got carsick with the bumpiness of the hard Tesla suspension, but is fine in this.

I returned the Tesla to the dealer on a recent Sunday afternoon. Normally this would be a busy time, but the place was empty. The Boston area has seen a constant stream of Tesla Takedown protests, but there weren’t any at that time. People were just sick of that guy. There have been big protests all over the area for the last couple of months, and Musk gets equal billing with Trump for people’s ire.

There are leaks from the Tesla board that they’re thinking of ejecting him from management. Good luck! Although he didn’t found the company, and has made catastrophic product design decisions with the Cybertruck and cancelling the Model 2, he has ensured that his name and its are one in the public mind. Just a few months ago they voted to give him 12% more of the company. He and Tesla are not going to be split, and are both going down the toilet together.