'Dogequest' Site Claims to Dox Tesla Owners Across the U.S.
214 comments
·March 18, 2025Jcampuzano2
AlecSchueler
> So are we really going down the road of telling people "Hey just buy a new car" whenever yours is politically inconvenient?
Can't things be exceptional? "Inconvenient" seems to go very far in diminishing what's happening here, and I think your point would come across very differently without the understatement. Is there really no line he could cross where you would stop calling his politics an "inconvenience" and support direct actions being taken? (Not necessarily this action in particular)
I understand the stigma is painful but I would implore you to consider how that pain affects your outlook and perhaps makes you feel more sympathy for the company than you otherwise would.
mlindner
The only people who think this is more than "politically inconvenient" are terminally online and aren't really seeing reality for what it is.
The people pushing for vandalism of these vehicles are way worse than Elon has ever been.
chneu
Tell that to the thousands who have lost their jobs in careers they no longer feel comfortable pursuing.
Claiming only those who are "terminally online" think this is more than inconvenient is an amazing display of either privilege or not giving a crap. Either way, lol calling kettle.
soraminazuki
Seriously? Vandalizing innocent people's property is wrong, but ransacking government institutions is far worse and much more consequential. There's an order of magnitude difference in the number of victims and the ways in which they're affected.
However, it seems that when the scale of the crime outgrows a certain threshold, the perceived severity goes down somehow. It's depressing.
soraminazuki
It's obviously wrong to harass innocent people. But at the same time, Tesla is so anti-consumer that switching cars might actually be beneficial. Tesla workers were caught spying on car owners through the camera, sharing in internal chat videos of people doing "really intimate things" or approaching the car "completely naked." Not only that, they were photoshopping it and memeing. It shows a culture of complete moral breakdown in the company. I definitely wouldn't want a Tesla in my home, even without the current political events.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-workers-shared-sens...
Marsymars
> Now I feel like I'm being punished for it through no fault of my own
Maybe, but something like 90%+ of all Teslas sold were manufactured after Tesla the company was already on my blacklist due to the ethical issues with supporting Musk.
(There are a number of companies on my blacklist, but off the top of my head I can't recall any others that are specifically there because of the singular actions of an owner.)
dvt
If you own Apple or Nike products, you're supporting child slavery. If you own products made in China, you're supporting religious genocide. "Blacklisting" companies is just lazy slacktivism that only someone in the middle-to-upper class Twittersphere (or Blueskysphere) would ever partake in.
Murder & terrorism are morally impermissible, but at least Luigi, or the Unabomber, or the Proud Boys put their lives on the line for whatever ideas (good or bad, you decide) they had. Testicular fortitude that only extends to Hacker News is not very convincing.
What do I do to make the world a slightly better place? I volunteer at my local church and at homeless shelters, I donate, I help my neighbors, I clean up the beach, I organize community gatherings. Enough online activism with grandiose ideas, start with making a small positive change in your local community.
dzhiurgis
Found typical Jalopnik reader
tekknik
why is your blacklist important? also isn’t it supposed to be called something other than “blacklist” now?
thechao
Tesla owner; same boat. I think Austin has voted with its doors enough for me to get the idea, at this point. I got the car in 2001, and it should be good for another 5–7 yrs as my daily commuter. I'm just resigned to my dingy fate, now.
The next car has to be a long hauler; we're looking at hybrid SUV/minivans. After that ... I hope Aptera is shipping.
doge1776
I’m in Austin and have a Tesla (which I bought new) and I love it. Next car will be another new Tesla as well. Austin loves teslas, they’re everywhere. A handful of degenerate leftists isn’t scaring anyone.
ben_w
> So are we really going down the road of telling people "Hey just buy a new car" whenever yours is politically inconvenient?
I mean, that kind of politics is kinda why the US has locally-made cars at all, rather than buying them at half the price from China (and that's not just Trump's new thing, the 100% tariff on Chinese EV's was from Biden: https://english.kyodonews.net/news/2024/09/0130c36c7c00-us-1...)
Or why the US briefly switched from "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries".
Or, famously, that time in Boston when the North Atlantic briefly became very weak, very salty, tea.
Montgomery bus boycott, the boycotts of South African Goods in protest against apartheid. Might even be able to argue alcohol and weed being made illegal due to political pressure that converts a boycott into a legal requirement.
palmotea
> Or why the US briefly switched from "French Fries" to "Freedom Fries".
That never happened, "the US" never did that. What really happened was a few people were dumb for a little while, and a couple of signs were briefly changed.
kshmir
I just love the Tesla, why would I care about what other people say? It works better everyday.
base698
The argument goes: Because 3% of the population is antisocial personality disorder in the screens on TV and the internet tell them it's okay to commit violence against you because Nazis.
You may not care but the crazy people care a lot.
kshmir
I still don't care. I may just buy another Tesla and a handgun :)
jarsin
What's crazy is this was always seen as a left wing car. If you drove one of these into small blue collar towns there is a chance you would have been harassed a few short years ago.
meristohm
What's the embodied energy cost of making your EV and driving it for X years compared to a similar ICE vehicle? EV tire wear (and thus, pollution) is greater due to the extra weight. If there's an edge on environmental harm reduction, it's marginal, and mostly in terms of reducing CO2 emissions, which is important yes. The impactful way, not just greenwashed way, to be environmentally friendly is to embrace "public luxury, private sufficiency"- support public libraries, health care, education (and not just to churn out workers...), access to local food (which, given our dependence on petroleum-derived nitrogen instead of birdshit, leading to our population boom, will be rather difficult), urban design that promotes moving around under one's own power (likewise stifling energy-sucking AI- far better to so things ourselves, as our bodies are already burning calories and want to be useful and meaningful), and more- using less than a few thousand tons of CO2/annum for example, or less than 2k Watts/day, something like this.
I hear your concerns, and it sounds like you're whining? I don't use Amazon anymore, for years now. I'm very close to going without Google. Deleted all my connections to Microsoft, moved away from Windows a few years ago and only use Linux and BSD (quitting videogames helped here, though Valve's Proton didn't help! I appreciate what they're doing, though), unsubbed from all streaming (we just use the library and PBS now), unsubbed from Apple, and more, and while I don't have much money to "vote" with anyway, I feel much better not contributing so much to the vampires (capitalism, neoliberalism (Hayek's term, not just disparaging), surveillance capitalism, etc).
Sell or donate your Tesla and move somewhere where you can walk/bike/wheelchair/bus to work? Embrace mutual aid (Dean Spade has a concise book on this) and help build community? You have a lot of agency, and maybe you have already considered all this (I didn't dig into any of your other posts, I'm just reacting to what sounds like whining, and I'm someone who indulges in that sometimes, but who sees a way out of that pit). Good luck!
dgrin91
Thats some pretty shady shit. I have a relative who is mostly a-political and bought a Tesla years ago with the intention of being good for the environment. Now she has a target on her back? What?
JKCalhoun
I get the environment angle. In the current timeline though, personally I would be considering all the other EVs that are also good for the environment but don't have the albatross hanging around their ... rearview mirror.
Agree it's a cruel thing to do though. I prefer the "I humped Your Hummer" type site from a decade or so ago. More humorous. Definitely mostly harmless.
selykg
Do Teslas even have functional rear view mirrors? I thought they did everything with cameras on the dash and only had as much shitty rear view mirror as necessary to not violate the law necessitating there be a rear view mirror.
outer_web
I didn't notice the 3's being particularly bad, the truck one is tiny, useless and presumably only there for compliance.
goosejuice
It's just like any other rear view mirror with auto dimming.
gonzo41
BYD just announced they can do full charges in 10 mins. The future is not Tesla.
base698
You should uncritically believe them, they have no reason to lie.
goosejuice
Which evs are those? Geely (polestar), Hyundai, and Lucid all have political baggage. GM caught up in Uyghur forced labor aluminum and sells driver data. Ford and most of the German and Italian automakers have fascist roots and were involved in forced labor. Many of them are owned by the same families implicated in those past decisions.
Rivian seems clean but they are more expensive, only SUVs, and aren't doing well financially. Even still you probably end up using superchargers.
rondini
What a ridiculous bad faith deflection. No other auto maker is explicitly and aggressively aligning itself with the current administration and their policies. Tesla’s CEO wants to associate his company with a political vision and is vocal about using his money to further that vision.
ben_w
> GM caught up in Uyghur forced labor aluminum and sells driver data.
I'd like the latter to be generally illegal (along with most of the analytics industry — just the other day I got a popup that wanted me to share my use of a website with 1604(!) partners, whereas my secondary school only had about 1000 students).
The former, I wish we could actually do something about, but China is so dominant on the world Aluminium markets that even if you didn't buy from them directly, all you're doing is substituting yourself for another buyer — boycotting Chinese aluminium is probably possible, but is like trying to get private individuals to boycott Nestlé.
> Ford and most of the German and Italian automakers have fascist roots and were involved in forced labor. Many of them are owned by the same families implicated in those past decisions.
Stuff that happened before most people alive today were born, and where the evil was systematically routed out immediately after WW2 right up until people decided there was a greater evil next door (in the form of the USSR), isn't going to upset people as much as hitching your wagon to a party that is currently doing as much as it can as fast as it can to undermine the USA's economic and global soft-power, while openly disregarding the sovereignty of two direct neighbours (including one he's a citizen of!), tweeting a well-technically about how many people Hitler killed, and doing something that is close enough to a Nazi salute to be unlawful to reproduce in Germany.
As for who to replace with, I don't know what their sales are like in the USA, but the Stellantis group collectively has a lot of brands.
rsynnott
> Ford and most of the German and Italian automakers have fascist roots and were involved in forced labor.
Thing is, everyone involved in that is dead, and in the case of the Germans the ownership has entirely changed (any continuity between today's VW and Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH is, well, incredibly tenuous, say). Like, it's hardly comparable to a company where the _current CEO_ is flouncing about doing Nazi salutes and tweeting Hitler apologia.
chgs
If you are a-political you implicitly support what’s happening.
ThrowawayR2
> "If you are a-political you implicitly support what’s happening."
Stop saying that. Stop stirring up people and instead let sleeping dogs lie.
From a detailed post-election analysis posted on HN earlier today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43400172): "The reality is if all registered voters had turned out, then Donald Trump would’ve won the popular vote by 5 points [instead of 1.7 points]. So, I think that a “we need to turn up the temperature and mobilize everyone” strategy would’ve made things worse."
Lots of people are indifferent or even supported what's happening and if your side continues to harass them they'll come out in even bigger numbers to vote against your side in the midterms or 2028. Hectoring people for being apolitical has been a losing strategy so stop following it.
Jcampuzano2
Ah so its just a "fuck you" if you just want to live a quiet life and care about your own life. Suddenly we have to be political and choose a side on every issue.
Come on man... its tiring as hell why can't people just be themselves. Why do we all have to be 100% connected to everything all the time.
patcon
As a Canadian, I feel quite exasperated and angry about how you frame this. Sounds very cowardly-American when your country is crumbling beneath you, taking the world down with it
raisedbyninjas
Unless you were raised by a pack of wolves in the wilderness, you're benefiting from the society that's been built by generations of your fellow man. Leeching off of that when it's convenient and living a private life when it's not, is a violation of the social contract.
outer_web
Apolitical or 100% connected. Zero middle ground.
chgs
Because when the people around you are suffering it is connected.
quickslowdown
Yes, it is. At this moment in time, none of us get the luxury of a quiet, simple life. Burying your head in the sand & refusing to engage with the world around you is a choice, a tacit support of what's keeping you from that ideal life you want.
It's a very tone deaf & privileged stand to complain about how an authoritarian government is making your life harder. If you're not being mistakenly imprisoned or actively hunted, the options are to join the resistance, or put your tail between your legs, let the government trample others' rights (and by proxy, your rights), and try to fool yourself into thinking you can just let things blow over.
If you're not joining in the resistance and you're instead choosing to sit out the fight for your freedoms & rights, you don't get to criticize the people who ARE fighting. They're fighting for themselves & their loved ones, and for you, whether you join in or not.
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coldpie
> Now she has a target on her back?
Well, sort of. The real target is Musk & his wealth, which is in large part derived from Tesla. The people doing this want to harm Tesla, by making owning a Tesla unpleasant, which depresses Tesla car sales & values, which harms Musk & his wealth.
It does seem to be a somewhat effective approach: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/03/used-tesla-prices-tumbl...
I'm personally kind of neutral on the approach. It is the case that most Tesla owners are not awful people and don't really deserve to have their lives upset by this. On the other hand, society really doesn't have very many options when it comes to reigning in invincible monsters like Elon Musk. Is this approach ethical? Probably not. Is it also the best available option? Seems so. I don't know.
m3rc
She should sell it, it's important to make people who may have been "a-political" before aware of what's going on.
HolyLampshade
I’m not sure I follow the logic here. Let’s say a person owns a Tesla outright, and purchased it ignorant to Elon’s behavior (esp if prior to the last year or two). How does selling it benefit some cause? Tesla already has that person’s money. It’s purely a performative action?
billyp-rva
> Tesla already has that person’s money. It’s purely a performative action?
Car companies care deeply about resale value, since that directly impacts new car value.
hexator
Teslas require constant maintenance (like all cars, plus the recalls) and many have a subscription, it's not performative. Each Tesla owner is an asset to them post-sale.
mayneack
Destroying the market for used Teslas and the brand harms Elon Musk's personal wealth which he uses to achieve his personal political goals. Now you may or may not agree with that as a method, but the logic is straightforward.
browningstreet
People are usually upside down on vehicle purchases for at least half of their finance period.
I know I am.. there's no selling my Tesla at this point. Not for a while, and probably not ever, the way things are going.
That said, I'm 100% for tanking TSLA stock down to $110 to make life very very miserable for Musk..
Marsymars
Why $110 specifically?
Astronaut3315
It's not reasonable to expect someone to sell their primary mode of transportation, likely at a loss, for reasons out of their control.
genewitch
Also sell toyota, nissan, folksvagen, Audi. Right? For the same reasons?
Glad I roll American coal!
ETA: i haven't driven a diesel in ~20 years, and it wasn't rolling coal. we have two japanese cars. If you can't detect the irony and self-deprecation in this comment, just move on.
KolmogorovComp
What’s your advice to the person who’d buy it then? Sell it again?
raisedbyninjas
There's value in the parts and eventually there will be scrap value.
netsharc
IMO this is a stupid "activism" move, similar to declaring people who stay silent on a topic (instead of joining your cause) as part of the problem. The activist declares that people not actively joining their protest are bad people.
Geez, guilt-tripping, what a great way to gain support for your movement.
patcon
I think it's maybe not as you understand. It's not a political movement -- they don't need your support. The goal is economic logic. It's trying to do economic damage to Tesla. No one needs to care if someone feels warm or cold about Tesla, they don't need to sell you or anyone but a very small subset on "a movement"... just that every rational actor has good reason to sell or never even buy.
netsharc
It's curious though, if the brand became so toxic/dangerous to own that no one could be caught owning one, and I want to sell my hypothetical Tesla, who's going to buy it? Nobody would want to own a molotov magnet (in this hypothetical scenario).
In the end it'll be hurting my wallet and not Elon's because I have to junk the car and buy a different brand.
Another scenario would be Teslas getting police escort and exclusive protected parking...
Volundr
To be clear, I'm not supporting damaging random Tesla's, just answering the questions asked.
> who's going to buy it? Nobody would want to own a molotov magnet
If nothing else, it has value as parts.
> In the end it'll be hurting my wallet and not Elon's because I have to junk the car and buy a different brand.
It hurts both. Nobody is going to buy Tesla is what they can look forward to a string of vandalism and eventually having to either sell it for a song or scrap it for parts. Tesla/Elon may already have the money from your current purchase, but destroying the second hand market and otherwise making it painful to own one reduces demand, and that hurts Elon's wallet.
walls
Make it Carvana / Carmax's problem, they'll take almost anything.
JKCalhoun
I feel like it actually worked for the AIDS issue.
mc32
It is. This turns off lots of moderate people.
The only people that support these moves are the proverbial choir, and not even the whole choir but the really fervent members.
This will have a net negative on the movement. Long term it’s good for Tesla because ordinary people don’t like these types of shenanigans.
LightHugger
It turns moderate people against you more than it helps. Not sure where people get this idea that moderates react well to purity spirals directed at them.
mc32
Right. The problem is these kinds of groups don’t carry internal dissent (sometimes by definition), so they carry out and do things that undermine their goals in return for some quick but ephemeral reward.
test098
oh no, not the moderates who checks notes stand up for nothing and no one except themselves and overwhelmingly align with right wing politics. what's the moderate position on Trump/Musk, that we should accept a little bit of authoritarianism to make the government more efficient?
netsharc
I'm guessing people who haven't taken a stance don't feel the pain (yet). The old adage is "No country is more than three meals away from a revolution." 1), and some people still have meals. But alienating the "moderates" might lead them to join the "other side", because "our side" are just full of assholes...
1) Variations: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/05/02/nine-meals/
mc32
Except those are over 90% of the population. This move is not going to win moderates over at all. It’s a feel-good move like a nice heroine shot.
tim333
I wonder if Musk may reconsider his actions as a result of the general outcry, not that I approve of the likes of dogequest. I mean in to 1990s they reduced govt employees by 426,000, consolidated 800 agencies and got rid of 640,000 pages of rules without the arbitrary cruelty. The doge stuff is quite unnecessary. (source doonesbury https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/2025/03/16)
amazingamazing
I’m sure this will go well and ensure the next election has a favorable outcome.
atomicnumber3
Because the last 3 have gone so well
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wormlord
I am not an expert sleuth, but using the WHOIS lookup tool it looks like the domain registrar is Japanese. Not to call everything and anything a "psyop" but if I were to set up something like this, I would do it for financial gain (shorting Tesla) rather than political gain, or to use it as a honeypot.
This kind of targeting of Tesla owners after the fact is essentially a dragnet that will affect people of all sorts of backgrounds, and is less effective than a direct boycott at achieving your political goals-- since you are going to polarize a huge chunk of people against you. I think many left-leaning protest organizers would understand this, but I may be mistaken since there are a lot of dumbasses in the world.
Again this is total speculation, but alarm bells immediately went off in my head.
atomicnumber3
Is it actually possible for things to get any more polarized at this point? You're either ok with this guy doing a Nazi salute in our seat of government, or you're not.
America needs to wake the fuck up and remind Nazis they are not welcome here and we already beat them once. Is this not a completely razor perfect targeted attack? No. But the guy you're supporting with these cars is fucking doxxing judges children to manipulate them. So I'm not going to fault this guy for fighting back.
zh1231278
Well, Ford and the Dulles brothers first supported Hitler against the communist threat. Up until Pearl Harbor WW2 was just a little continental war where it wasn't clear which side should be annihilated.
In the end they gave Poland, which was the initial casus belli and supposed to be protected by Britain, to Stalin (another lesson what being a proxy for maritime powers looks like).
Were any Ford cars vandalized during the time?
Jensson
> Up until Pearl Harbor WW2 was just a little continental war where it wasn't clear which side should be annihilated.
It wasn't in America but it was in the rest of the world, since European powers controlled such a large part of the world back then.
kshmir
https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1889165338337493244 who reported this is... actually... a jew?
Oh my god.
wormlord
Dude people bought the cars before Elon revealed himself to be a Nazi. Owning a Tesla does not make you an ideological fascist.
outer_web
Tip of my Sean John hat to you sir.
openmarmot
even the ADL stated it was obviously not a nazi salute. please pull back from the brink and stop advocating for political violence
wormlord
That means nothing, the ADL is willing to make an uneasy alliance with legitimate antisemites if it means furthering their settler colonialist project in the middle east.
atomicnumber3
he literally did it not once, but twice. i've been alive for thirty two years and done my fair share of autistic shit (programmer). But yknow what I've managed to never accidentally do? Anything even vaguely resembling a nazi salute. And yknow what? Fine, suppose for a moment it was an accident or whatever. If i were a billionaire figureheard of my company on national television in the seat of power of the free world, I would ensure I had media training and knew how to not have the international audience go "wow he just did a nazi salute, twice" if I didn't intend it. Remember George W stopping himself from saying the sound bite of "shame on me"? Elon is either literally, genuinely stupid, or he meant to do a nazi salute. And I honestly don't believe Elon is stupid from an intelligence perspective.
One last remark: if I did accidentally do a nazi salute on live television, do you know what I would do at the soonest available opportunity? Clarify that I'm not a nazi, it was an accident, and that nazis are bad. It's a surefire way to ensure you're not accidentally perceived as a nazi. Similar to how "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" really helped Dead kennedys in this regard.
computerthings
[dead]
e_i_pi_2
Does anyone know the URL for the actual site? Seems weird to write about a website and not link to it, and searching for it just brings up more articles that don't link to the site
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SideLinesOfCode
How is this not political intimidation? It’s basically saying “someone go do something, here’s a list of people to harass”
jmuguy
Yeah this definitely doesn't help anything. I don't know why some people can't understand that everyone can get behind dunking on Elon Musk, because he is clearly an alien wearing a human suit. But doxxing Tesla owners is absolutely stupid.
anothereng
well if you're not part of our team you're the enemy now. -them
kgwxd
It doesn't help anything, it hurts. It puts people in danger. It paints protestors as "terrorist". It gives Elon something to point at to claim himself the victim. Which is how we know actual Tesla protestors aren't behind it.
lvass
Tesla has been in the news so much recently, from things caused by external actors. I wonder if there is some ongoing short and distort.
iamtheworstdev
no you're just seeing increased public backlash against Elon being taken out on Tesla.
spacemadness
HN seems to be really struggling with the why here. The bubble that people live in on here is wild to me. Maybe you have issues with the tactics, but the why is pretty clear.
tyleo
Agreed. The whole financial news market seems to be like this though. I see headlines like, “Tesla drops on Cybertruck quality issues.”
Get real, everyone knows the brand is damaged.
rafram
The CEO is hardly an external actor. What you're seeing is the personality behind a personality-driven business steadily destroying his reputation, and his business along with it. Elon Musk's public image went from "real-life Iron Man genius inventor" to "Nazi salute guy" - his businesses can't just brush that off.
Zigurd
You think at Tesla's P/E ratio it's a "short and distort?" It's a meme stock that detonated because the meme field generator fell down the k-hole.
Workaccount2
Tesla is grossly over-valued even with Musk totally removed from the equation.
outer_web
Tesla sales plummet 70% yoy in [country]
rapsey
Tesla short sellers have been using the media for many years.
puppycodes
literally every car company has already doxed you.
So are we really going down the road of telling people "Hey just buy a new car" whenever yours is politically inconvenient?
The car already has low resale value, and if they did sell it it doesn't get it off the road. I do own one, and honestly I hate driving it around now because of the stigma but its the only car I have and while yes I could sell it at a massive loss thats both a lot of work and a waste of my time, effort, and money.
It was literally the first car I ever bought and was because I liked the convenience of EV's and for the environment. Now I feel like I'm being punished for it through no fault of my own and always have to look over my shoulders, and I don't even like Elon in the first place and never really cared for him.