When Joe Sipher bought a Tesla in 2011, there were so few on the road when drivers passed each other they would wave. He had the car for eight years, loved it and never thought about Elon Musk.
Those days are in the past. Sipher, who replaced that first car with a Model Y two years ago, said when his lease ends in May he is unlikely to stick with the company. He recently put $1,000 down on a Lucid Gravity, which he said would not have happened if Musk’s support of president-elect Donald Trump had not disturbed him enough to explore other options.
Sipher, a San Diego resident, said he is not a person to take public political stands, and the very public stances taken by Musk — Tesla’s divisive, love-him-or-hate-him chief executive — makes it impossible for him, a consumer, to keep his own views private.