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How Tesla Turned Owners Into Hostages
And one pothole revealed everything
A man drives his $100,000 Cybertruck down a battered road. A pothole, a mundane and frequent flaw in asphalt, shatters the vehicle’s rear frame. Four months and $34,000 later, it is perfectly clear that Tesla has engineered more than electric vehicles; it has constructed a labyrinth of dependency where ownership is an illusion and repair a ransom.
Fair warning, even compared to my usual long-form work, this is LONG. Please persevere. It’s not so much TL:DR as “It was long, but I stuck with it and it was great”. :)
The scandal here isn’t the price tag, although that is. But it’s the systematic erosion of autonomy in the name of progress. It’s telling us just how far down the path to technofeudalism we have come.
Now, let’s go.
So, trying to steer car owners to official dealers is not unique to Tesla. We have all experienced it. But Tesla’s “capture model” is extreme. While other industries (e.g., agriculture) face similar battles, Tesla’s combination of technological lockdowns, legal aggression, and market dominance in EVs makes it a unique case in the automotive sector. Comparable EV…
