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For more than a decade, owning a Tesla was the dream of car buyers looking to embrace a future of environmentally friendly electric vehicles and autonomous driving.
Those who bought their Teslas in the early 2010s couldn’t have imagined that 15 years later, owning their high-end EV might inadvertently paint them as authoritarian sympathizers.
While Tesla is still a very popular brand, an increase in competition, paired with Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s controversial role in Donald Trump’s administration, has sent some potential customers searching for other EV options.
Options like Lucid Motors now hope to capitalize on the growth of so-called “Tesla refugees.”
Lucid Motors
Lucid is a California-based EV manufacturer that so far has two vehicles under its belt: the Air sedan and the Gravity SUV, the latter of which will be available to consumers this month.
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Marc Winterhoff, the company’s interim CEO, told Yahoo Finance that he hopes the Gravity will be the volume-mover the company needs to make a splash among the American public at large.
“Americans want to have an SUV. That’s the quintessential American car, the size of the pickup truck. It’s a much larger addressable market for us, and therefore much larger demand,” Winterhoff told the news outlet.
Barring any unforeseen hiccups, Lucid is hoping to produce 20,000 EVs by the end of the year. Finding buyers to shell out the nearly $80,000 for the cheapest Gravity will be Winterhoff’s struggle, but thankfully, there is at least one group of consumers who have a history of opening their wallets to avoid using petrol.
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Tesla refugees
According to Winterhoff, former Tesla owners “definitely” represent a significant chunk of the company’s new and prospective buyers. He told Fox Business that his company has seen a “dramatic uptick over the past two months” of Tesla owners buying his vehicles.
“Tesla buyers always were the source of our sales because they were already used to using electrical drivetrains, and they look for an opportunity to have something else, something better,” he said. “And now, with recent changes, obviously, since the beginning of the year, we see a clear uptick of interest in Lucid from Tesla buyers because they’re looking for another option.”
Winterhoff said approximately half of his orders are from former Tesla drivers.
Tesla’s stock dropped 36 percent in the first three months of the year, making it the company’s sharpest drop since 2022 and its third-biggest decline for any quarter on record, according to CNBC.
In the US, Tesla’s sales dropped 11 percent in January, which is an oddity as EV sales are trending higher in the US, according to Cox auto insights.
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When Fox Business asked why Tesla drivers were abandoning their Teslas, he attributed the recent shift to owners’ “negative feeling[s] about Elon” and a lack of new products outside the love-it-or-hate-it Cybertruck.
The CEO noted that some former Tesla customers were trading in their Model 3s in exchange for Lucid’s Air sedan — and paying up to twice as much as the Model 3’s cost to do so.
Other than unimaginable and staggering wealth, the one thing Winterhoff does not have that Musk does is protection from the White House.
Trump, Tesla, and Tariffs
In response to Musk’s gleeful firing of federal workers via DOGE and his controversial inauguration day “salute”, there has been a rise in attacks on Teslas and the company’s property. Storefronts and vehicles have been keyed, spray-painted, and burned. Tesla owners have even received threatening notes.
Such was the fury at Musk that demonstrators planned an entire day just for picketing Tesla’s dealerships around the world.
Donald Trump and his Attorney General, Pam Bondi, have threatened to treat anyone who vandalizes a Tesla, Tesla dealerships, or Tesla infrastructure as a domestic terrorist. The president has even suggested sending vandals to a notorious prison in El Salvador.
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Tesla benefits not just from Trump’s draconian sense of criminal justice, but also from his economic policies. After the president announced a 25 percent tariff on imported cars and some parts last week, the stock price for each of the Detroit Three fell. Tesla managed to emerge unscathed because it produces many of its cars in the US.
Thankfully for Lucid, it does as well.
All of the company’s vehicles are made in Arizona, insulating it from Trump’s tariffs. Not only are the cars themselves made in the USA, but the vehicles’ powertrain components and many parts, including battery cells, are produced in the States.
“We are very highly vertically integrated. So we’re building our battery modules, building our battery packs also in Arizona,” Winterhoff said. “We have done this, you know, bringing manufacturing stateside as much as possible [even before the tariffs].”
With challengers like Lucid entering the market and legacy car manufacturers increasing their EV offerings, it was inevitable that Tesla would lose some customers to its competition.
But it’s clear that it is a distaste for Musk — rather than a desire for novelty — that is driving the Tesla exodus.
According to a poll from YouGov and Yahoo News, 67 percent of American respondents said they would no longer buy a Tesla, with most saying Musk’s actions turned them off to the company. More than half — 55 percent — of the respondents said they had an unfavorable opinion of Musk.
