Tesla drivers say they’ve confronted highway rage and heckling

• Tesla drivers say they’ve confronted harassment since they began driving the EV, The Guardian reported.
• The electrical-car house owners say they have been heckled and reduce off in visitors resulting from anti-EV sentiment.
• Tesla vehicles are outfitted with a number of cameras which have publicly documented the incidents.

Tesla drivers declare they’ve confronted extra incidents of highway rage, like being reduce off in visitors and heckled, since they began driving the electrical automotive, in keeping with a current report from The Guardian.

“I seen the highway rage throughout the first week I received it,” stated one man, who lives in Thousand Oaks, California, and did not need to be publicly outed as a Tesla driver.

He informed the publication that he’d confronted incidents of highway rage eight occasions in November, alone. “I will simply be driving the identical velocity I had in my previous Ford Fusion, however they will reduce in entrance of me and drive actually gradual or forestall me from switching lanes.”

A number of Tesla house owners informed The Guardian that the incidents seem to stem from anti-EV sentiment, quite than dislike of Tesla CEO Elon Musk — who’s nearly synonymous with the model and has generated a slew of polarizing headlines over time.

One Tesla driver, John Shevelew, informed The Guardian that the incidents appear extra prone to happen in Southern states, the place electrical vehicles are much less prevalent. Three extra drivers stated the situations of highway rage are sometimes perpetuated by people driving pickup vans. 

“It is nearly at all times a man in a pickup truck [who does something],” Laura Kennedy, a Tesla proprietor from Pennsylvania, stated. “I do not assume I’ve ever been flipped off in my life as a lot as I’ve up to now 12 months or so.”

There is no knowledge to show Tesla drivers face extra highway rage than others, however there have been a number of reviews of conditions the place electrical vehicles seem like targets of harassment. In August, Axios reported that over a dozen Tesla drivers in Iowa had been “routinely heckled, reduce off in visitors, and blocked from charging stations.”

The publication detailed a number of widespread threads throughout the reviews of harassment from the Iowa Tesla Homeowners Membership, together with situations of “rolling coal” and “ICEing.” Rolling coal refers to moments when drivers of bigger autos blow exhaust at an EV, whereas ICEing is when drivers of combustion-engine autos try to dam electric-car house owners from accessing charging stations.

Many Tesla house owners have caught the situations on digital camera, and there is even a YouTube channel devoted to Tesla automotive crashes — a lot of that are attributed to highway rage.

The channel, known as Wham Baam Teslacam, additionally depicts situations of individuals cursing out Tesla drivers, vandalizing the vehicles, and chasing them down. Teslas are outfitted with a number of cameras and in addition characteristic Sentry Mode, a system that permits drivers to observe their autos from afar.

Learn The Guardian’s full report on its web site.