A Trump supporter stops in front of a Tesla Takedown protest at the Westmont, Illinois dealership on March 15.

Alternate History

Tesla, like the Cybertrucks they produce, are crashing & burning. First quarter 2025 sales were out yesterday, showing about a 13% drop from the previous year. This isn't industry-wide, as General Motors nearly doubled their Q1 2024, the VW ID. Buzz hit the market, and the ID.4 sales were up in the U.S. market. While overall GM and Volkswagen sell a fraction of the electric vehicles Tesla does, the trend is obvious. The world is going to continue to slowly adopt electriv vehicles, and an increasing number of EV buyers are choosing vehicles other than Tesla.

Elon Musk just went all-in on a Wisconsin Supreme Court election and lost badly, #TeslaTakedown protests line the streets in front of his dealerships on Saturday mornings, and he's increasingly becoming an icon of the deadly sin of greed. Except Tesla passengers and the working class are the ones doing the dying.

I don't know why Elon's heel turn started, but Elon used to be proud of scoring 100 for LGBTQ equality by the Human Rights Campaign. Tesla made vegan cars. Every left-wing celebrity you can name traded their Prius for a Model S. Tesla's entire business model was electric vehicles in an age when jacked-up 4x4 trucks and rolling coal were becoming conservatism's favorite non-firearm virtue signals.

Elon isn't alone in this. He was joined by two other outspoken billionaires in the VIP section of President Trump's second inauguration. The onetime humble Honda Accord-driving billionaire Jeff Bezos now looks like, and rides in a yacht befitting of, a Jamed Bond villain. Mark Zuckerberg was always an ass, but lately he's taken on the look and persona of a Love Island contestant.

One of my favorite authors from back when I was more into sci fi, and one of my favorite Bluesky follows is Harry Turtledove. A lot of folks have written about what might happen had the Confederacy won the Civil War, but nobody else that I know of has fleshed out a multi-book series on what would have happened during the first World War if the trenches ran through Tennessee & Kentucky as the CSA allied with Britain and the USA allied with Germany.

Safely assuming that Elon Musk wasn't the difference between victory and defeat for Trump 2024, I'm going to play “what might the automotive market look like in 2026 if Elon Musk didn't turned right?” But this is just a few hypotheticals, I can't write decent dialog.

First off, I don't think he would have been unwelcome at Joe Biden's electric vehicle summit in 2021. Not only could Tesla could have taken center stage as the biggest EV company in America, but Elon could have had the ear of Congressional Democrats as they were weighing the EV credits section of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed five days later.

Just showing up at an event hosted by Joe Biden to sell electric vehicles would have been enough to send Fox News into fits of rage, but they hated him already just for selling the cars they hated. They thought government was going to take away their pickup trucks too when they came around to confiscate all the guns & cheeseburgers, and electric vehicles feature in so many George Soros/Agenda 21/15-minute city conspiracy theories. Just selling electric cars made him a de facto leftist in the wild eyes of the MAGA crowd.

Aside from not turning fascist, all Musk had to do publicly is not bullshit people on “appreciating assets,” Autopilot, Full Self Driving, that Hyperloop thing, the Cybertruck, Path of Exile 2, and his tax-deductible charitable donations. Maybe that's the lesson here, all he had to do to be a better person was to choose honesty. Empathy would have been a nice addition, but not as important to where this story is going.

Being on the good side of history didn't require him to turn left when he turned right. He didn't have to blow forty-four billion dollars on Twitter and expose himself in the most public way possible as only LARPing as an engineer if he didn't feel the need to unban Andrew Anglin and Andrew Tate. There was no one in the political center to unban. All he had to do here was absolutely nothing. He could have kept that money in his pocket, that aura of “real life Tony Stark” unbroken, and stayed exactly where he was before politically: an assumed left-of-center capitalist.

Sometimes it does require an action. Elon's main obsession is Tesla's share price, which is where most of his net worth is derived. With the Cybertruck Musk chose to pander to the kind of person he feels kinship with, which is sadly the wealthy libertarian tech bro class that fantasizes of taking their bulletproof Cybertrucks out of a gated community named Galt's Gulch and surviving the apocalyptic hellscape that “woke” government created, which is basically the version of Chicago that Fox News shows. The kind of person who listens to Red Barchetta and wishes they were driving the air car. Had Elon stayed in California and taken the path of trying to finally create the $30,000 electric economy car for the working class, Tesla could have been the largest component of every ESG fund created just as the Governor of the state and the President of the United States were incentivizing people to buy a product that Tesla had a near monopoly on.

The point is that Elon Musk could have gained tens of billions more in shareholder value for each billion “lost” to taxes and lower pressure sales tactics. Not to mention the money lost on Twitter. It's a principle that the destructive type of billionaire just doesn't understand: a smaller slice of a larger pie is still more pie. Maybe it has something to do with more than the wealth itself since there's no possible way to Brewster's Millions their way through that much money in one lifetime. Maybe it has to do with power, or being the first to a trillion, but destructive billionaires will go full Nero on the entire economy regardless of the collateral damage to their own companies as long as they gain spots in the Forbes 400.

More important than the money, at least to a normal person, Elon could have had the genuine respect and adoration of good people who appreciate a positive contribution to society, something he seems to desperately desire but from the wrong sort of people. Perhaps he would even have the respect of his older children. At the very least SpaceX wouldn't seem like a sinkhole for federal money if his version of the “light of consciousness” was something more meaningful than Joe Rogan's podcast.

And when Trump's re-election comes, as inevitable as Thanos and just as capable of making half our federal workforce vanish, Elon didn't even have to become a hero of the resistance. All he had to do is quietly remind people that the Tesla Model Y was the most American made vehicle in 2024, and that three of Tesla's four models that qualify for the list are in the Top 10.

Staying in the political center likely wouldn't have changed politics. Vivek Ramaswamy could have run an office with a bog standard U.S. government agency name and done just as much damage. More, even, if he did it slowly and quietly. But by letting someone else do that dirty work Tesla dealerships would be unprotested, unvandalized, and his European sales largely unaffected by politics except for maybe a little anti-American sentiment resulting from the President's changing sides on Ukraine.

The loss of EV incentives under Trump is going to happen one way or another, but a statement of “we're switching to electric for the well being of our planet with or without you” would have gone over well with Tesla's core buyers, which had been doing that for years before the incentives were passed. Being the only self-sufficient American EV company would have benefitted Tesla when funding for Rivian and others is canceled.

Instead of divestments from foreign governments disgusted with the Trump administration and Musk's role in it, investors could look to Tesla's lines of American made products geared towards energy independence (cars, solar, home batteries) as a safe haven from the Liberation Day tariff war. With his share price at the very least not dropping as quickly, his net worth would be much better than it is in the current timeline.

Also, good people value honesty and relatability more than success. People would rather see him muddling badly through silly computer games with any one of his kids instead of raging on the dead husk of Twitter that their oldest son was killed by the woke mind virus and faking being the best in the world at Steam's 70th most popular game. A reputation for honesty helps a CEO's company when they are the public face of it. George W. Bush was elected President on the idea that he was the kind of guy you'd rather have a beer with compared to Al Gore.

So here's my alternate history, where mostly keeping Elon on the course he was on before Trump came along, could have left the American auto industry in 2026: in addition to the refreshed Models S, 3, X, and Y, which sold more in 2025 than in 2024, Tesla is cranking out hundreds of thousands of hatchbacks comparable to the Nissan Leaf in size and $29,500 price tag as once “cheaper” alternatives from legacy automakers, with their production previously shifted to Mexico for lower labor costs, suddenly find themselves costing $40,000 or more. Factories are finally going up on this side of the border, but it's a slow process made difficult by the lack of capital that the drop in sales has caused. Without the Cybertruck to compare it to, the GMC Hummer looks like a fat pig of a truck and General Motors takes an enormous amount of criticism for getting into electric vehicles for the wrongest possible reasons.

There's pressure to create a pickup truck, but without the Cybertruck, Rivian has been largely left alone in the electric pickup truck and van space. Elon thinks that if Rivian loses the lawsuit to keep the money Congress appropriated, they'll go bankrupt and he could fold their vehicles into the Tesla lineup with a minimum of effort.

The cesspool of Facebook still hates Elon Musk for reasons that almost always involve a conspiracy theory, but he doesn't care. Everyone else respects the guy who queietly posts to Twitter every now and then about SpaceX launches, new Tesla software gimmicks, and his family. He doesn't make political speeches, but you know what he means when he posts “Love you Viv” every March 31st.

The share price is over $500 as people from all walks of life, capitalist, environmentalist, techie, outdoorsy, wealthy and working class try to get into the stock of the “company that will build the future” as much as they can soon as they can. Is the stock still wildly overvalued? Sure is. But it's one I'd have in the portfolio just as a matter of FOMO. As opposed to an overly hyped bubble waiting to burst, a solid company that sells stock on optimism because it occasionally changes entire industries for the better is bound to catch up to its valuation.

This could have gone so much better for Tesla and Elon Musk. But perhaps it's best this way, as a smarter and more serious person would have done a lot more damage to this country. Perhaps, luckily for us, this is the paradox of fascism: anyone smart enough to implement it competently is also smart enough to stay away from it.

History Beyond the Bumpers

The Crittenden Automotive Library includes information from all aspects of automotive transportation and competition. This section highlights topics related to automobiles other than vehicles themselves.

I've been to only a few car shows this past decade. I haven't had the energy to be around many people since the whole Trumpism thing started, and what few events I've attended are still stuck in my phone. But I stopped by a Tesla Takedown protest in Westmont, Illinois a few weeks ago and took some pictures of the protest signs. These pictures have even made it online!

Being around a different crowd didn't help my mood about the situation much, because we were all still gathered there because of the really awful plight our country finds itself in. Plus I've discovered that my new iPhone has some kind of AI photo enhancement that makes everything look AI generated. Especially the license plate numbers, bumper stickers, and badges. Photographic evidence that looks like a second rate free online AI website made it up is going to eventually get someone into trouble they shouldn't be in or get someone that should be in trouble out of it.

So this is should be the end of the Event Photography run, at least the end of my going out and taking my own photos for CarsAndRacingStuff.com exclusives. Heidi might have something else to say about it, especially if we get an old car and she gently nudges me to get out of the house with it and make friends.

Anyway, this sort of reminded me that someone on Reddit this past month started a conversation about a black hole in their family's photo collection. In between the era of film cameras and today's cloud storage was a generation of potato quality cellphone cameras and collections of photos gone forever when devices were damaged or stolen. Not everyone was good about downloading them to their computer and saving them, and what was saved kinda sucked.

It's an interesting observation that a lot of people said applied to their families in the comments.

Taking pictures at car shows isn't a great way of preserving images of old cars, but it was all we had in the earlier days of the internet before mass digitization efforts put original press materials and brochures online. And while those materials are the best for showing stock vehicles in their original condition, car show photography can be great for other reasons. The images show the kind of people standing around at different kinds of car shows, and sometimes you catch an interesting or forgotten funny t-shirt. You can also see what styles are popular in each decade, what kind of cars show up, and what kind of wheels & modifications people have on their cars.

629.2

The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about the printed materials in The Crittenden-Walczak Collection.

The basement organization is going well. A lot of progress was made in March, and that included getting to a section that had been blocked off for several months.

It was in that section that I found two file crates of uninventoried books from early 2024. That pushed inventory to 1,694 total in the collection, and nudged the total number of individual volumes not counting duplicates to just over 1,500!

Between a book sale this month and finding a book from a sale last year, the petroleum subject in my inventory has doubled in size. “Phillips: The First 66 Years” and “Sign of the 76” (published in 1976) are two fantastic number-themed titles published by each oil company. There's a lot in each that doesn't have anything to do with cars, but there are intevitably great photographs of early gas stations that made these must-haves.

But for title alone nothing I've found on petroleum beats John Margolies' 1993 coffee table book “Pump and Circumstance: Glory Days of the Gas Station.”

Telemetry

CarsAndRacingStuff.com site statistics.

The five most popular pages for the month of March (not counting basic index pages) were...

Article: The tricks to resetting a Dodge Grand Caravan Computer

Topic: Chevrolet C30

Topic: Pontiac Laurentian

Topic: 1970 Pontiac GTO

Topic: Chevrolet Cavalier

About The Crittenden Automotive Library

The Crittenden Automotive Library @ CarsAndRacingStuff.com, based in Woodstock, Illinois, is a free online collection of information relating to not only cars, trucks, and motorcycles, but also the roads they drive on, the races they compete in, cultural works based on them, government regulation of them, and the people who design, build, and drive them. We are dedicated to the preservation and free distribution of information relating to all types of cars and road-going vehicles for those seeking the greater understanding of these very important elements of modern society, how automobiles have affected how people live around the world, or for the general study of automotive history and anthropology. In addition to the historical knowledge, we preserve current events for future generations.

The Library currently consists of over 900,700 pages of books, periodicals, and documents, over 57,800 individual articles, more than 18 days of video & 24 days of audio, more than 36,100 photographs & other images.

About The Crittenden-Walczak Collection

The combined personal collections of John Walczak & Bill Crittenden provide reference materials for The Crittenden Automotive Library. The collection currently includes 1,503 different book volumes/editions, 2,544 unqiue periodical issues and 865 catalog issues, as well as booklets, brochures, comic books, hero cards, event programs, and 382 hours of video.