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by Lammy·7mo ago·view on hn ↗
> I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it. So many vehicles, especially in the truck space, are almost indistinguishable and lack any kind of imagination.

I 1000% agree with this, in fact I love the way it looks, like something out of a SEGA Saturn game. But I would never buy one for the same reasons I would never buy any Tesla, or in fact any EV, or any post-2014 car at all. But the looks of it are not one of those reasons :)

I do have to laugh every time I see a Tesla with one of those “Bought this before we knew Elon was crazy!!” stickers, because to me they just read as “Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”. It's weird to me to think that other people are thinking that way about their automobiles, because I bought mine (Prius C) based on its features and how they fit into my needs and my life. I guess the Prius line was a popular “statement car” of the pre-Tesla era, though, like how Brian drives one on Family Guy, or the “Smug Alert” episode of South Park, but it was never that for me.

6 comments
> Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”. I

I read it exactly the opposite. Somebody bought a car not because they were making a statement but just because they thought it was cool, only to find out later Elon was a nazi nutjob, and they don't want people to think they bought it because they share the same views.

Nobody thinks you share the same views as the CEO of your car company. Jesus. GP is right. It makes them seem utterly self-conscious.
People were absolutely giving attitude towards people in Teslas in general, and Cybertrucks in particular, around the peak of all the DOGE nonsense.

Still are, for Cybertrucks

Nonsense?

Yeah, you're right, the US Federal government is a peak engine of efficiency and it's nonsense to think massive sums of money are wasted.

If I told you I could save you money on fuel by making your car more efficient, then removed it's engine, you would still call that nonsense no matter how much of a gas guzzler it was before or how little fuel gets put in it now.
You just made a massive non sequitur. The government does have waste, as does any large organization, including in the private sector. Whether or not DOGE saved money needs an independent analysis, not numbers which DOGE itself produces.

Musk and Trump cut a large number of jobs and declared, without any evidence, that it was all fraud and waste. For example, they dismissed everyone who was in a probationary period, claiming these were all low-performing people. In fact, every person hired or promoted was automatically in a probation status. In many cases the fired people turned out to be critical and the government asked them to come back.

Think about this: when Enron exploded, it took a team of forensic accountants months to untangle the bookkeeping. Musk came in with a team of mostly teenage hacker types to siphon all the data from all the agencies he could and in less than 48 hours declared he had found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud. It beggars belief that Elon Musk just happens to be an accounting expert and could process terabytes of data and make sense of it in a day or two.

Another thing you should know is the founder of Gumroad, a man in his 30s and who joined DOGE in a good-faith effort to help make the government more efficient, found that things were not at all like he expected. Even if you don't believe him, he was closer to the action than Musk, has more technical knowledge than Musk, and if nothing else, offers a counter-narrative from what you apparently have bought:

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/02/nx-s1-5417994/former-doge-eng...

After expressing his opinions he was quickly sacked by DOGE. Transparency indeed.

Oh, and many (hundreds?) of thousands of people will die each year due to loss of international aid. Meanwhile Musk was dancing around on stage like an idiot with a chainsaw thinking he was the coolest guy.

I witnessed massive fraud first hand in the DoD and the VA (the area this gumroad guy was dealing with) as a Booz Allen contractor.

I worked directly with fraudulent shell 8a firms (literally a big white dude made his Filipino American wife the CEO of like 6 people and then subcontracted to my team with a direct award minority woman owned business contract valued at a $100m).

I witnessed massive waste by VA employees at the joint MHS/VA hospital in North Chicago, IL (they sandbagged an expensive IT modernization that was trying to reduce wait times because it was going to put a bunch of local VA sys admins out of work by shifting to a gov cloud data center).

You don't know what your talking about. You don't have first hand knowledge. Nobody on the ground for years in the Federal sector agrees with you or the gumroad guy. They agree with me.

My twin brother worked at a "Native Owned" defense contractor in Arlington, and literally never saw a Native American in their office a single time. There were employees with Washington Redskins merch everywhere and nobody cared because they KNEW that the single tribe that collected the checks at the top was never going to see the office. They just subbed out work to the big consulting firms anyway.

I have endless examples from working in the beltway for 10 years. Sorry that reality doesn't line up with your political tribal beliefs.

Nonsense in how they approached things. Clinton-era we had govt. cut backs all over the place. It was done according to a plan and according to the law.

This was just a hatchet job, aimed and cutting and gutting any and every agency they thought they could get away with.

Not that you share the same views but at least directly funneling money to someone harming many.
You do that merely by using the monetary system at all.
"You criticize society, yet you participate in it!"

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...

You won't survive long without using the monetary system, but you could go your whole life without supporting many of the companies who you see as harmful. Now that money is speech and corporations are increasingly running the oligarchy there are very few levers people have left to try to influence their government. I don't think boycotting massive corporations will be any more successful than trying to get our representatives to care more about our wishes than the bribes they get from those same companies, but at least it feels like doing something.
I'm not sure how that adds to the conversation. Let's say North Korea puts out a really cool phone. Are you going to go: "yeah buying it supports a dictator who is brutal to his people but so does participating in a monetary system so nothing matters so it's okay"
People absolutely do. Elon, Trump, and his supporters have politicized the cars (https://www.the-sun.com/motors/11906310/trump-rally-cybertru...) and now the connection is to be expected.

It's not surprising since people don't really have meaningful representation in government and have to resort to trying to hit companies where it hurts in order effect change whether that means boycotting a car company because of a CEO, or boycotting a beer because of a trans person in an instagram ad.

Unfortunate as it is, what you buy and where you shop is very much a political statement.

You're labeling someone a "Nazi nut job" over nothing.

It's juvenile and silly and screams "midwit overly absorbed into political news."

Enjoy your unearned moral superiority. It's a thin blanket against the cold wind of mediocrity, but you do you.

In 2026, if you're genuinely unaware of his white supremacist opinions, perhaps you need to be more absorbed into [sic] political news.
He's alluded to thinking that Asians and Indians are "better" on some metrics so supremacy still seems a bit sensationalist. He certainly doesn't think all races are equal.
> You're labeling someone a "Nazi nut job" over nothing.

Nothing except his antisemitic tweets, his posts defending Hitler, his support of Alternative for Germany, his support of prominent white supremacists, his chatbot which praises Hitler, his endorsement of racist conspiracies, and the occasional "Sieg Heil". What exactly would "something" look like to you?

Being morally superior to that is an exceptionally low bar to clear and it's earned easily by everyone who rejects the hate and lies he publishes, supports, and encourages.

The man is officially a dear friend of Israel, he has never defended Hitler, he indeed supports the German far right party, his chatbot had an alignment issue that has been patched within 16 hours.

What you call a "Sieg heil" was an innocent hand gesture made once, and that hoax has been debunked by both the anti defamation league and the Israeli PM personally. You know this, yet you cannot let go of your hate.

I know you are not to be listened to when you dare say "innocent hand gesture made once", when he very clearly made it twice in a row; front, turn and repeat: https://m.youtube.com/shorts/R_6dVlz6mug

That is there, recorded, and you are telling me to ignore what I see.

I know you won't care, this video is not for you, is there in case anyone else starts to belive your lies, they can see for themselves.

If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then we have to entertain the possibility that we are dealing with a duck.
To me it looks like Musk is overly concerned about discrimination against whites as well as woke ideology, also out of personal experience with his child.

The rest, where progressives slander Musk and label him a Nazi or, their newest addition, a pedophile, appears to be a litany of lies, like the ones just shared above.

> Elon was a nazi nutjob

I find it hilarious that people think this because he did some tangentially Roman-salute-esque gesture once. His political platform is nowhere near Nazism. He would actually be a much more interesting person if it were.

Then sell the car. Putting the sticker on the car won't make you look good in the eyes of either Elon fans or Elon detractors.
Selling the car is complicated by market conditions and tariffs which could make the cost of a replacement and/or the terms of the sale much worse. We can cut people some slack for making a stupid purchase under very different circumstances. They're already being punished by owning the shitty car as it is.
This seems like it is speaking from privilege. I have not even paid the car off, 5.5 years later. I am not going to sell a perfectly working (if not very good IMO) car at a loss. And buy what instead? No, I will stick with my functional but terribly unergonomic car now built by a nazi.
Let me get this straight. You bought a "statement car" but not for its statement, and then you assume that other people driving a different "statement car" bought it because of the statement?
Yes, anybody who puts a sticker on their car apologizing for owning it is somebody who bought it to make a statement. I bought mine because I researched best gas mileage, lowest ongoing maintenance cost, and dimensions that fit the the city, and that's what I came up with.
>Yes, anybody who puts a sticker on their car apologizing for owning it is somebody who bought it to make a statement.

Or the opposite, buying the car wasn't a statement at the time and they don't like that driving it feels like a statement now so they got a bumper sticker to acknowledge that their continued ownership is not a statement of support for Musk and his ideology.

Real ones wouldn't be thinking about it at all.
Lots of reports of Tesla's getting keyed. I know Tesla owners who bought the sticker just to avoid getting keyed.
So it all boils down to "No True Scotsman"? How about I offer you an alternative:

We don't try to guess why you bought what you bought, or why you need to so actively rationalize it, and you stop assuming that those stickers are something other than "Please don't key this car" signs. Less dramatically some of them are also "I bought this before the guy started throwing celebratory HiterGruß on stage and carving up important parts of the government for nonexistent savings."

Which... for people outside of your bubble is something important.

The world's richest man did a nazi salute. Real ones would fight WW2 against him
How are you defining "real ones"? Because it seems like you're implying that someone can't have political opinions while also occasionally making apolitical decisions.
Until someone who hates Elon (not saying that's wrong per se) throws a brick through the window (which IS wrong per se) and you're on the hook for paying for it.
Then you are really bad at research
The 175k miles I've put on it over the last decade say otherwise :)
> then you assume that other people driving a different "statement car" bought it because of the statement?

He assumed that people who drive a statement car emblazoned with a big sticker that says "HERE'S THE STATEMENT I INTENDED TO MAKE" bought it because of the statement. I think that's a reasonable assumption.

How is a Tesla a "statement car"? A Cybertruck, sure. But Tesla's are as normal as anything on the road nowadays.
Depends on the market. In Australia Tesla is much pricier than all the Chinese options (more the norm). In my area people who would have probably bought a Tesla are looking at BMW's range.
They also avoid buying certain cars to make a statement.
You're right about it looking like something out of a game. I passed one wrapped in fluorescent green at a gas station the other night (owner was checking the tire pressure) and it indeed made think 'low polygon count'. I would not have been entirely surprised if the driver had looked similar.

Thing is, after the initial momentary amusement the novelty quickly evaporates. It doesn't have the compelling presence of, say, a Tumbler. https://brucewaynex.com/pages/tumbler

> “Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”

The correct interpretation for most people is "I bought my car because it was a good car and now for reasons beyond my control it may appear to be a political statement. Also sorry for giving that guy money, I didn't know he would spend it on Trump."

I understand you don't think it's a good car, which is fine, but most people who bought one did not agree with you.

Your comment is a little confusing because you obviously understand this concept, you bought a Prius because you thought it was a good car, not because of a political statement others may have projected onto your purchase. The same is true of most Tesla owners.

> The correct interpretation for most people is "I bought my car because it was a good car and now for reasons beyond my control it may appear to be a political statement. Also sorry for giving that guy money, I didn't know he would spend it on Trump."

No, he had it right. Those stickers are idiotic. It won't make anyone like them any better. Sell the car if you don't like it that much.

They may not have put it there because they were "self-conscious" about their "statement car." They may have put it there in an honest attempt to avoid having their car vandalized for something they had nothing to do with.
> I guess the Prius line was a popular “statement car” of the pre-Tesla era, though, like how Brian drives one on Family Guy, or the “Smug Alert” episode of South Park, but it was never that for me.

... So you admit to falling for Toyota product placement in cartoons.

Did Toyota pay for "Smug Alert"? Wasn't that the one where owning a Prius was smelling your own farts?
Learn to read. I actually didn't see that episode until years after I both owned a Prius and lived in San Francisco, and I found it very funny :)