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sorry, owning a tesla is a sign of being poor?




At least in Denmark where I live, since Tesla started competing on cost a few years ago, and then the DOGE fiasco. It’s the car you get if you’re already a Tesla owner and hardcore believer, or just see a car as a means of transportation and buy purely on specs. The days when Teslas were status symbols are long gone. We can buy so many other interesting EVs here, for example I just had a friend who was an EV hater six months ago come by showing off his brand new Renault R5 today. That car has 10x more character than a TM3 and costs less even if he got it fully loaded. VAG has a very strong lineup of TMY competitors that combined are vastly outselling it, and so has Kia/Hyundai and Renault. Those with more money will go for BMW, Mercedes, Audi, or even Porsche. And then there are all the Chinese brands starting to make inroads. Most here see buying Chinese as less problematic than buying Musk.

I visited a friend in EU and we had a lot of problems charging a Renault. It takes forever and it was a pain. One of the network chargers didn't work. Problems of the car detecting the charge. And once we found a working charger we had to leave it for a long time and we lost an appointment.

Tesla has a decent supercharger network. And now Chinese manufacturers are building theirs. AFAIK none of the European brands has anything even remotely like that. I heard people buy hybrids due to this problem.


In Northern Europe we have lots of fast chargers now, and apart from Tesla, which is open to anyone with their app, none are tied to a particular car brand. I’ve never encountered problems fast-charging my BMWs. Most cars you can buy today have the option to pre-heat the battery, but it is possible that not all owners know how to activate that. The newer Renaults run on Google software, which is said to be very user friendly and good at route planning.


Apparently the secondhand market is so bad (perhaps due to the whole thing where Tesla doesn’t permit wholly independent resale) that in some markets they’re some of the cheapest to be had that are qualified for ride share drivers. There’s a silly percentage of older teslas being used for that purpose in some cities.

In the sense that being overweight is a sign of being hungry.



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