The first Tesla I ever saw was parked on a street near City Hall in lower Manhattan. It was orange, I think, and striking enough in design so that passersby like me stopped to look at it. “Is that a Tesla?” we murmured, and yes, it was.
That was a long, long time ago. Nowadays, all sorts of once-striking (and still strikingly expensive) cars have taken the aerodynamic design path of regular old…cars. So when I saw a Tesla parked on a block near my house, I failed immediately to identify it. It looked like any old car.
Now, I am the opposite of a car maven. Indeed, the only reason I know why all these expensive cars look like whatever cars (aerodynamic design) is because my brother is a car maven. Unlike me, he has owned cars and several subscriptions to car magazines, so when he answers my question (“Why are these cars no different from all other cars?”), I trust his answer.
If, on occasion, I wish to identify a car I see, maybe because it looks like every other car but seems somewhat more substantial, I’m left to spot the emblem, or whatever that thing is called that is usually on the nose of the car (or whatever the “nose” is called in automotive lingo). So although the body of the car could be anything at all, I am able to ID a BMW, a Mercedes, an Audi, a Porsche. Et alii.
(Speaking of Porsche, why did they re-design its body to look like a Nissan, say? Wasn’t Porsche fast enough before it went whole hog into this aerodynamic copycat thing? BMW? Not fast enough until it started to look like a Suburu? And, PS, my knowledge of cars is so vacuous, I had to ask Perplexity how to spell “Suburu.” Which is actually “Subaru.” Thank you.)
Back to Tesla. I’ve come to notice that, unlike the other expensive cars, Tesla does not have its name on the cars, as do BMW and Mercedes, et alii. They have emblems AND names on their cars. But Tesla? No.
So, as I was walking on 74th Street a few weeks ago, I saw a car and for some reason wondered if it was a Tesla, but without the name on the car, I did not know. Because I hadn’t yet been able to identify the unassertive emblem. (It is unassertive; it could be a Kia emblem, for all I know. Which isn’t much, as I’ve already mentioned.)
Hm, I thought, and continued walking.
Now here’s the weird thing. Four more parked cars onward, there was another one of those cars with an emblem I couldn’t identify, but this one had a small plaque on its rear end that read something along the lines of “Anti-Elon Tesla club.” It was near enough to the emblem so I could mentally connect the two. So now I know what a Tesla emblem looks like.
Two Teslas on one Upper West Side block? Parked on the street?
But that isn’t quite my point. Which is, welding on a small plaque announcing you love your Tesla but not its infamous chief is apparently the 2025 version of the 1970’s hand-written signs pasted on the inside of car windows: “No radio, no valuables.” That is, “Please please do not break into my car because you won’t get anything!”
I’m not sure whether that pleading notice worked in the 1970s but I’m fairly sure the Elon-hating Tesla sign isn’t going to do anything in New York City. Except to cause a New Yorker walking by to laugh out loud, derisively.
Pitiful. Yet neither car had a scratch on it. What does this mean? We NYers are too sardonic to key Elon’s cars. (Our preference is to key voodoo dolls that look like Elon.)