Elon Musk built Tesla's showrooms in true-blue enclaves. Now he's paying the price.
Adam Rogers
5 min read
No big car lot gets between angry protesters and a New York City Tesla outlet in early March.Leonardo Munoz / AFP
Americans angry about Elon Musk's unprecedented cuts to government services are voicing their displeasure at Tesla showrooms, and Musk isn't happy about it. "Who is funding and organizing all these paid protests?" he recently groused on X, referring to the ongoing wave of Tesla Takedown demonstrations taking place across the country.
But the better question for Musk might be: "Who built my showrooms in a way that made them such ideal targets for demonstrations?" Because the answer is: Elon Musk.
Car dealerships tend to be relegated to the outskirts of big cities, but most of Tesla's 276 showrooms in the United States are located smack in the middle of bustling neighborhoods full of wealthy progressives. That puts them right next to popular stores and busy restaurants, increasing the brand's visibility and foot traffic. It's ideal if you want to sell a status-symbol electric car — but maybe not so ideal when people are up in arms about your full-tilt, questionably legal operation to gut federal services to millions of Americans.
Musk put his showrooms in tony blue neighborhoods for two good reasons. First, he needed a way to get around state laws that bar carmakers from selling directly to consumers. So Musk turned Tesla's lack of in-person sales into a selling point. The cars at a Tesla "gallery" aren't there for you to buy. Oh my, no! The grubby exchange of money happens online. That means that unlike other car dealerships, Musk doesn't need to park a fleet of unsold Hyundais along some six-lane highway on the far fringes of town. "Our stores," Musk boasted in 2012, "are designed to be informative and interactive in a delightful way and are simply unlike the traditional dealership with several hundred cars in inventory that a commissioned salesperson is tasked with selling."
Second, Teslas are designed for affluent, progressive, early adopters, not the F-150 crowd. So it makes sense to locate the showrooms where the customers are. "We are deliberately positioning our store and gallery locations in high foot traffic, high visibility retail venues, like malls and shopping streets that people regularly visit in a relatively open-minded buying mood," Musk wrote.
I asked the American Communities Project, which maintains a county-by-county map of the United States that breaks out demographic characteristics, to sync its data with the locations of all 276 Tesla showrooms. Sure enough, more than half are in what the ACP calls "big cities" or "urban suburbs." Likewise, overlaying Tesla showroom locations onto neighborhood data (courtesy of the National Zoning Atlas) shows that they're predominantly in census tracts designated as "inner suburbs." Those tracts are fewer than a third of all neighborhoods, but they're home to more than half of Tesla's showrooms.
In short, Tesla put itself in places where people are better educated, higher-income — and more likely to vote Democratic. Which means that Tesla's clever showrooms have made the company vulnerable to protests by the very people the showrooms were built to attract.
"Just when they basically won, it seems like they're finding a way to lose now," says Dan Crane, a law professor at the University of Michigan who is the author of the forthcoming book "Direct Hit: How Tesla Went Straight to Consumers and Smashed the Car Dealers' Monopoly." Sales are down, Cybertrucks are being set on fire, and Tesla's stock price has plummeted by more than 30% this year. "Their retail strategy made them sitting ducks," Crane says.
People have protested car dealerships before. In the early 2000s, ecological activists actually blew up Hummers at dealerships on the West Coast. But Tesla showrooms are qualitatively different from those of its rivals. "They are actually in places where people congregate," says Dana Fisher, a sociologist at American University who is the author of "American Resistance."
That's important for protest strategy, because it means Tesla showrooms are located near public spaces like sidewalks, where it's legal to stage a demonstration. Nobody has to trespass on a car lot. And a Tesla store in an outdoor mall or a bustling shopping street puts protesters right in the faces of potential Tesla buyers. "The goal here is shaming consumers about their purchasing decisions," Fisher says. "To protest a brand, it's great to be able to go to a dealership."
It wouldn't make sense to protest at one of Donald Trump's hotels or golf courses — they're heavily guarded, they're too far away from everything, and the wealthy people patronizing them have already picked a side. But if you want to put pressure on Elon Musk's stock portfolio, the addresses of 276 possible protest locations are right there on the Tesla website. "Tesla facilities are basically the most common, well-known, and visible symbols of Elon Musk, and Elon Musk is the most well-known, visible symbol of the cruelty, inhumanity, and incompetence of this administration," says Patrice Kopistansky, a retired government lawyer who has helped organize Tesla protests in Virginia.
The locations help, Kopistansky tells me. The Tesla showroom in Tysons Corner is surrounded by other high-end car dealerships, but those operations are set way back from the sidewalk, amid lots full of unsold cars. Tesla's building is close to the street, which makes it easy to picket. "I don't know why they built it like that," Kopistansky says. "They've probably come to regret it."
And as a bonus? When Tesla drivers stop at the traffic light nearby, protesters can offer them bumper stickers printed for the occasion: "Sorry I bought a Tesla!"
Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Business Insider.
