I'm a Tesla-Driving Liberal

Cue the tiniest violin in the world

Brooklyn-based writer Sammi LaBue behind the wheel of the Tesla she bought in 2020 for environmental reasons

“We can’t buy a Tesla. Only douchebags drive Teslas.” This had been my immediate response when it came time for my husband and I to buy a new car in 2020.

Long ago given the moniker “Captain Planet,” my husband is part owner of a renewable energy company, whose environmental activism is etched into his ancestral ethos. At the same time, the Tesla image went against his Chaco-wearing, composting, secondhand sensibilities. “Not flashy” doesn’t quite begin to cover Henry, who calls his personal style “normcore.” He would be thrilled if your party invitation included your living room’s paint color, so he could blend right into it. Though I’m far more keen to stand out in a crowd, his neutral fashion sensibilities strengthen his appeal, as a white cis man who understands he already takes up his share of space.

The only two Tesla owners I knew so far were the opposite: a superficial and pompous distant relative and some guy who cheated on my friend and verbally abused her.

Henry laughed at my douchebag argument. “Then we’ll be the first Tesla owners that aren’t douchebags,” he countered. He’d done his research. At that time Tesla was the only affordable choice with a decent mileage range and a large charging network. While Henry too was wary of the Tesla fanatics who we would later meet at charging stations around the country, taping Tesla vlogs for unidentifiable audiences and buffing their paint jobs with Tesla-emblemed microfiber cloths, nothing could stop him from the allure of never pumping gas again.

In 2020 there were only a few electric vehicles (Evs) on the market, and Tesla’s supercharger network had exploded, expanding rapidly across the country. As New Yorkers with family in Colorado, California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont during a pandemic era where gas stations and airports were hotspots for illness, Tesla was an amazing option for travel, and our best choice, ensuring we could charge no matter where we were in the country.

We weighed the two guilt trips against each other: the elitist optics of having a Tesla or having the privilege to be able to afford one while still burning fossil fuels. The Earth won out.

When we picked up the car—a grey model Y—its large interior screen first prompted us to name it. We chose “Ricki,” the first thing that came to me after discussing Ricki Lake with my sister the night before (where was she these days?).

I was emotional driving Ricki from the dealer. I was so proud that mere energy from the sun could now power my vehicle, and for the first time I wasn’t actively polluting the air as I drove. Maybe my future children would never even know how to pump gas, I thought. We were driving off into a greener future free of tailpipe emissions.

In 2021, I was still happy to have Ricki, when I drove to the Shenandoah Valley with my dog for a writing retreat. At the time I worried my Tesla with New York plates would make me enemies as I drove deeper into the conservative south. Now, in 2025, I worry my car will be vandalized in Brooklyn, where most of my neighbors share my same political convictions.

Having only made his allegiances clear in May of 2022, when we bought the car it was still a toss-up as to which side of the aisle Tesla owner Elon Musk would ultimately land. His abject evilness feels inevitable now, but when he was donating to organizations backed by both parties, I imagined he’d go down in history like Nikolai Tesla himself, an eccentric character who moved us forward despite his mental illness and aimed to make electricity a resource for people of all socioeconomic standings. Typing this, I realize that’s what Musk wanted me to think by naming his company Tesla. But where Nikolai was focused on bringing power to all people, Musk seems fueled by greed, ego, and fear of those he can’t understand.

Whether or not he was once in it for the environment, I of course now feel guilty for contributing to the unconscionable wealth that led to Musk’s moral undoing. In fact, when driving my Tesla now, I feel like the very douche I hoped to avoid becoming.

Whether facetious or not, the most overwhelming suggestion from strangers and acquaintances, including some of my own family members, has been to burn my car. “Are you going to set your car on fire?” has been hurled at me over the phone, in a group email, and on the street.

My car has become a symbol of hate because of the man connected to it, but it’s also my family’s only vehicle. While it’s true that I no longer want to drive it around because of the person it represents, it still evokes other memories, like the way it felt to zip past gas stations on a road trip for the first time, that feeling of doing something big to lessen my carbon footprint.

Coming into our lives during the first pandemic summer leading into our first years as parents, the car is inevitably imbued with a feeling of safety, too. Ricki kept me warm when I had to take my husband to the ER for a bee sting on a cold night and wasn’t allowed in due to COVID precautions. Ricki got my isolated best friend out of the house and took us to a drive-in theater during the reign of the Delta variant, keeping our aerosols to ourselves and our butts warmed during the whole movie. We drove my newborn daughter home from the hospital in Ricki, glad for all the safety cameras, which Henry monitored meticulously from the Upper West Side home to Brooklyn.

That’s all to say, it’s been a good car. To light it on fire might fulfill the same kind of moral duty putting down a dog who was aggressive might, but it would be a wildly and ironically environmentally unfriendly act to end this chapter of our lives that started for the opposite reasons. Since the beginning, many non-douchebags have come to own their own Teslas, and now, if not lighting them on fire, they’re scrambling to sell for half what they bought them for or are paying to break their leases.

In the grand scheme of groups who Musk has scorned in recent years, those of us who drive the cars he manufactured are certainly the lowest on the totem pole to feel sorry for, but still we represent yet another group of people ostracized and bullied because of him.

Recently, while he charged his Tesla at a mall charging point, a Black friend of mine was called both a Nazi and then the n-word by the same angry passerby, whose bigotry evidently made him both cruel and stupid. Last week I walked past a Tesla parked near Washington Square Park with a swastika scratched into its nose with a key.

Some of my friends who attended this year’s AWP writing conference bragged about cancelling their Uber rides from drivers who were coming to pick them up in a Tesla. I understand that we hope protest might bring us peace, help us avoid that feeling that I tried to avoid years ago when I picked out my Model Y online, the feeling of being a douchebag on the wrong side of history. But I couldn’t help but feel sorry for those drivers who thought they were making an investment in their business and our planet when they bought their cars in the first place. I couldn’t help but think of LA’s smog-choked air, and the bit of relief a few years of Tesla’s popularity allowed it.

The fact is I wouldn’t buy a Tesla now, but should that mean my environmentally conscious choice should have such demoralizing consequences?

I couldn’t have known it when I first drove through Brooklyn behind Ricki’s wheel, but in the end my biggest Tesla disappointments are so much deeper than being a douchebag. They are in realizing that recently, even my political peers seem to be choosing destruction over progress. We’re so fueled by anger at each other—and I’m well aware there’s a lot to be angry about. Believe me, I love that Tesla is now tanking as other electric vehicles and charging networks catch up to them. I’m relieved that we will soon need a second car, and I have more options to choose from than I did back in 2020. But to add to the din of hate speech seems to only give strength to the anger meant to polarize us.

Doesn’t waiting for a different Uber car only take money from that driver’s hand? Aren’t we only doubling our carbon impact? If anything, in this situation, Musk wins again, disenfranchising us from our core beliefs, having us turn away from the people and planet we would ordinarily be moved to protect.

Recently I pulled up to a meeting in Westchester alongside a new acquaintance’s own Model Y, hers black. We were quiet for a moment waiting for others to join us. “Nice car,” I quipped with a sympathetic smile.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she conceded. “Didn’t it?”

Yes, the string quartet at this pity party should be a very small one, but the next time you see a Tesla with an “I bought this before he went crazy” sticker on it, remember that many Tesla owners are experiencing buyer’s remorse like we’ve never felt before. Thank you for your understanding as we replace our cars safely and ethically. Not so long ago it wasn’t about right or left, good or bad, it was just about team Earth. Musk called Democrats “the party of division and hate.” Let’s not let a car distract us as we prove him wrong.

A Brooklyn-based writer and educator, Sammi LaBue is the author of the creative writer’s guided journal, Words in Progress (DK 2020), and the founder of Fledgling Writing Workshops, a generative writing community named one of the best writing classes in NYC by Time Out New York. Some of her other writing has appeared (or is forthcoming) in The Sun, HuffPost Personal, Buzzfeed, Slate, Literary Hub, and many gracious others. Her current project is a dual memoir written in collaboration with her mother called Bad Apples.