Angry at Elon Musk’s unprecedented cuts to government services, Americans have expressed their dissatisfaction in Tesla’s showrooms, and Musk is not happy about it. “Who’s funding and organising all these paid protests?” he recently groaned at X, referring to the ongoing wave of Tesla Takedown demonstrations taking place across the country.
But Musk’s better question is, “Who built my showroom in the way that made it the ideal target for demonstration?” The answer is: Elon Musk.
While car dealers tend to be relegated to the suburbs of big cities, most of Tesla’s 276 showrooms in the US are located in the middle of a bustling neighbourhood filled with wealthy progressives. This will place it right next to popular and busy restaurants, increasing brand visibility and pedestrians. Ideal if you want to sell status symbol electric vehicles, but it may not be so ideal if people are armed with full tilt and questionable legal business to disrupt federal government services to millions of Americans.
Musk placed the showroom in Tony Blue’s neighborhood for two good reasons. First, he needed a way out of state laws that prohibited automakers from selling directly to consumers. So, masks have turned Tesla’s lack of face-to-face sales into a selling point. Tesla “Gallery” cars are not there for you to buy. Ah, no! Coarse exchanges of gold are done online. This means that unlike other car dealers, the mask doesn’t have to park the fleet of Hünda for sale along the six-lane highway on the town’s far-away edge. Our store boasts in 2012, “our store” is “designed to be interactive in a useful and interactive way, unlike traditional dealers with hundreds of units in stock, where the commissioned sales representative is tasked with selling.”
Second, Teslas is designed for wealthy, progressive early adopters rather than for the F-150 crowd. So it makes sense to find a showroom where your customers are. “We intentionally place our store and gallery locations in high streets and highly visible retail venues, like the malls and shopping streets that people visit regularly in a relatively open-minded buying mood,” Musk wrote.
I asked the American Community Project, which maintains a county-by-county map in the US that disrupts demographic characteristics, to synchronize data with locations in all 276 Tesla showrooms. Sure enough, more than half of what ACPs call “major cities” or “city suburbs.” Similarly, overlaying Tesla showroom locations with neighbourhood data (course of the National Zoning Atlas) indicates that they are primarily located in census regions designated as “internal suburbs.” These areas are less than a third of all regions, but more than half of Tesla’s showrooms live.
In short, Tesla was placed in a place where people were better educated, high-income and likely to vote for Democrats. This means that Tesla’s clever showrooms have made the company vulnerable to the protests by the very people that the showrooms were built to attract.
“It seems like when they basically win, they’re finding a way to lose right now,” says Dan Crane, a law professor at the University of Michigan. Sales have fallen, cybertork is on fire, and Tesla stock prices have plummeted more than 30% this year. “Their retail strategy has become ducks sitting on them,” Crane says.
People have previously protested car dealers. In the early 2000s, ecosystem activists actually blew Hammers away at dealers on the West Coast. However, Tesla’s showrooms are qualitatively different from their rival showrooms. “They’re actually in places where people gather,” says Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University, author of “American Resistance.”
Tesla has built stores to attract progressive urban people.
That’s important for protest strategies, as it means that Tesla showrooms are close to public spaces like sidewalks. No one has to trespass on the car. Also, Tesla Stores, located on outdoor malls and bustling shopping streets, will place protesters on the faces of potential Tesla buyers. “The goal here is to embarrass consumers about their purchase decisions,” Fisher says. “It’s great to be able to go to the dealership to protest the brand.”
It’s pointless to protest at one of Donald Trump’s hotels or golf courses. They are strictly guarded, far from everything, and the wealthy people who love them have already chosen the side. However, if you want to put pressure on Elon Musk’s stock portfolio, there are addresses for 276 possible protest locations on the Tesla website. “The Tesla facility is essentially the most common, well-known and visible symbol of Elon Musk, and Elon Musk is the most famous and visible symbol of the cruelty, inhumanity and incompetence of this administration.”
The place helps, Kopistanski tells me. The Tesla showroom at Tysons Corner is surrounded by other high-end car dealers, but these operations are coming back from the sidewalk, amid many of the unsold cars. The Tesla building is located near the street, making picketing easier. “I don’t know why they built it that way,” says Kopistansky. “They probably started regretting it.”
And as a bonus? If Tesla drivers stop at a nearby traffic light, protesters can use the opportunity to provide printed bumper stickers. “Sorry, I bought a Tesla!”
Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insiders.
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