I don’t think they hate EVs, it’s just they have a couple of groups that fight the direct sales.
I was in Michigan for a year a little over 35 years ago, back when the automakers were suffering from the inability to compete with the more efficient and better built foreign cars. Back then their cry was “buy American”. Now if I point out that the big 3 assembles cars in Canada and Mexico, that foreign manufacturers have plants in the US, and Tesla is the car truly made in America, they go quiet.
They miss the old days, when the big 3 were successful, and Michigan was successful because the manufacturing was here. They miss the power of the UAW, when unskilled people could get jobs paying $30 per hour, and strikes were used often, used to bring the manufacturers in line. They drove up the price of the U.S. made cars, and even when the U.S. manufacturers finally saw the light and tried to compete, the UAW would strike, further crippling the industry.
I was at a hospital in Michigan back then. Union mentality ran deep. The nurses joined the Teamsters union and within a couple of months of unionizing, they went on strike. The nurses had been promised benefits during the strike, but since they’d been in the union such a short time, there weren’t funds for benefits. The nurses were on picket lines, out of work, unpaid, and angry at any nurses that did cross the lines. I’d never been in a state with unions like this. The nurses were on the job one day then striking the next. I’d always thought of nurses as medical professionals, dedicated to patient care above all else. They abandoned the patients. Nursing supervisors weren’t in the union. They filled in caring for patients, and other health professionals and trainees were shoehorned into the nursing vacuum. The hospitals discharged all they could. The strike went on and on. It was a rude surprise to the striking nurses that the Teamsters expected the nurses to stay out of work, not take other jobs, and to man the picket lines, and that there wasn’t money to support them while they did this. Some nurses had no choice and returned to work. The hospitals survived.
Still the unions here were powerful, and the union mentality had had decades to pervade the very fabric of society. People felt entitled to those high paying jobs. Unions protected their workers, protected unreasonably high wages for unskilled labor, and put their manufacturers in a position of being unable to compete. There was drug use and alcohol use. Those people were protected by their union, they weren’t fired, but the quality of the work suffered and so did the quality of the product. Manufacturers lost market share, there were layoffs, plants closed, and many autoworkers found themselves out of work. Economic forces prevailed despite the desperate wishes of the Michigan unskilled work force. Those high paying jobs went away, finally out of the control of the unions. It was too late to save the industry that had ignored the increase in gas prices years before, and had not changed with the market. Car companies bankrupted and were saved with bailouts. The unions lost power. This left the people of Michigan angry. They didn’t blame themselves for driving US made car prices beyond the market, they didn’t blame their unions, they didn’t blame the gasoline industry. They blamed the consumers that bought the more efficient well built cars. Expensive non US cars were vandalized. It’s that mentality that caused the people here to strike back the only way they knew, to scratch “buy american” into the hoods of Porsches
It’s a couple of generations later now. The Michigan workers have been economically battered, their unions reduced to shadows of their former power. There’s still anger. Now it is subdued. The people here still buy cars from the big 3 despite their being produced in Canada and Mexico. They are loyal to their brands. The absolute dedication to US production has faded. Now they’re just defensive of the old US brands, so they don’t see the US made Teslas as a product of the US, they see it as another brand threatening their beloved big 3.
Tesla doesn’t have a big UAW presence. People here resent that. Tesla makes maximal use of robots, functional auto workers that don’t call in sick on Fridays, don’t drink, don’t use drugs, don’t leave out bolts, and don’t strike at the drop of a hat. Tesla’s suppliers are now reliable. Tesla doesn’t worry about a strike by a company that makes brakes shutting down the Tesla lines.
In the old days, a strike from a supplier of a single engine component would bring car manufacture to a halt. If the auto makers wanted to use components from plants that weren’t unionized, the UAW would block it. And with power came corruption.
Tesla does face resentment here. There are a few groups such as the car dealership groups that fund and fight Tesla’s efforts to sell directly here. That’s not going to change soon, not if the typical Michigan resident has anything to say about it. They’ll continue to buy from their dealers, but now those dealers include Hondas, Toyotas, and Subarus. Those dealers aren’t owned by the manufacturers, they are privately and independently owned. Dealership overhead makes the cars more expensive. I think the figure is 17% more expensive.
There are quite a few Teslas in Michigan. There are more all the time. Economic forces will eventually prevail as they always do, but it won’t be a short term change, it’ll take generations. Just like bigotry, you don’t change minds, you have to wait for the old to die off and be replaced by the younger and more progressive, those who’ve grown up without the memories, and who don’t have the deep loyalties. Until those collective memories fade, things won’t change here.
