There was a time when it was cool to have a Tesla. The company did not even need marketing efforts to sell its vehicles, its service centers were praised by customers, and the Supercharging network made road trips possible with EVs (even if longer than with combustion-engined cars). It’s been a while since this is no longer that way, and two recent The Onion articles show Tesla ownership became a mockery motto.
In February 2020, the comedian PJ Sears already made a video saying that you could “pretend to save the environment while looking rich” by buying a Tesla. More recently, Trevor Noah and William Shatner made a video deriding Elon Musk as the “visionary futureman.” The Onion focused solely on Tesla but took the parody to entirely new levels.
The first hit came with a slideshow with the things you should never say to someone who owns a Tesla. It starts by advising readers to avoid saying they must save a fortune on gas: doing so will rob them of the chance to brag about that, which The Onion says they “inevitably” will.
You should also not say that their car is on fire: if they survive, you will get a lecture on spreading “unfounded rumors.” Tesla advocates even coined an acronym for that: FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt). The list goes on with many other jokes about very similar subjects to those PJ Sears mentioned in his 2020 video.
At least three involve Full Self-Driving, which is not named a single time, but that’s implied. One example is that you should never tell a Tesla owner that you’ve hit more pedestrians in your “regular car: it is not a competition.” Asking if it has ever driven them to a social event is also forbidden. After all, you’d already know the answer, and that would be cruel to those paying $15,000 just for the hope that it will ever happen.
The next blow to Tesla is directly related to FSD. Tesla would have fitted new equipment to its Model Y+ Monday (which obviously does not exist): a thresher. It would automatically shred all evidence that the driver ran over anyone, meaning there would be no bodies left even if the car hit “a large group of pedestrians.” The thresher would be able to “process” “over 250 pounds of DNA—including bone, blood, and skin – within 60 seconds.”
The Onion fictitiously managed to speak to a Tesla spokesperson: Jenna Wheaton, a character the website already used in another one of its stories – a very NSFW one. She was a masseuse, which is certainly not a random pick considering the recent scandal involving Elon Musk and a flight attendant who worked for SpaceX.
If even (dark) humor does not sound the alarm for Tesla to fix its public image, we can’t imagine what will do the trick.
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