How to distance yourself from your car's ill-informed far-right views, by a Tesla driver

By Ryan Whittaker, who just wanted to save the planet

A YEAR ago, my Tesla Model 3 was cool. I admit I gloated. Now I am driving around in a Reichsmobile, but these avoidance tactics mean it doesn’t define me politically:

I’ve had it resprayed

The Pearl White favoured by Elon now seems a bit political. So I’ve gone for a full rainbow respray, supporting the LGBTQ community by spreading joy and the jazz-hands of harmony to the world. Other topical pimp-ups: yellow and blue like the Ukraine flag or a utilitarian DEI black.

Installed a non-authoritarian satnav voice

Guidance need not be barked. New voice software lets Noam Chomsky guide me around ring-roads, Tony Benn remind me to keep left unless overtaking, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr to inform me everyone gets to their promised land if I allow others into my lane.

I’ve relocated

Is your car still a white supremacist where there’s no-one around to hear it? No, which is why I’ve moved to the coast by Cape Wrath. Here, it can park staring out into the sea spouting its isolationistic rhetoric, honking its horn and flashing its headlights at distant little boats, just like Nigel.

I play loud left-leaning music

My car needs to be re-educated, and I’ve got the men for the job. So it’s Gang of Four, Black Flag, The Clash and any soul songs absurdly optimistic about melting pots and living together. Blasting the early works of Chumbawamba at traffic lights. Mouthing ‘I’m not a Nazi’ at pedestrians.

I’ve reasoned with it

It’s made me join X or it wouldn’t start the ignition so we have little discussions on there for eight or 12 hours, late into the night. I’ve explained that Tommy Robinson isn’t a political prisoner, Zelensky isn’t a dictator running a war-sized grift, and the Woke Mind Virus is stolen from a book called Snow Crash. No progress yet, but early days!

I’ve given the car a nice lefty name

Via a personalised number plate, my Tesla is now called L18 3RAL. I did catch it ordering a Kanye West swastika T-shirt online – they’re internet-connected at all times, such a marvellous car except for the delusions – and told it off. I think we’ll soon be up to rejoining society. Unless Elon’s done anything even worse in the last 24 hours.

The six worst celebrities to be caught in a K-hole with

INVITED to a Hampstead dinner party? Discussion of this season’s ballets or Friedman’s monetarism petered out? Deciding which A-lister to snort ketamine with always delivers: 

Geri Halliwell

A regular user, certainly, but only for her mental health. The current state of which she is ready to expound on, at length, while you struggle to formulate a response. Every aside about the glory days of 90s pop you want to follow up on is mixed in with right-wing rhetoric and gossip from inside Formula 1 you couldn’t give a f**k about.

Bradley Walsh

The most punchable face in television hanging over you like a big, sweaty moon while you try to re-establish contact with reality? Babbling on about the time in 1995 when he saw Crowded House? Telling you his son can get you anything you want, even fresh pig adrenalin glands? No.

Tom Hardy

You’d think this would be fun. He seems personable and he’s been in loads of films you’d love to hear about, as long as he avoided the Venom trilogy. But it turns out Hardy is the type that spends the whole trip dancing in one spot as he mumbles to himself and repeatedly pinches his nipples.

Lorraine Kelly

Somehow, as a reflex, retains the urge to chat. Look in her eyes and she’s completely gone, out-of-body, fully lost in the dissociative wave but on the surface her mouth is moving and she’s asking you about your new line of elegant kitchenware while you sit against a wall, drooling, only the whites of your eyes visible.

Benedict Cumberbatch

Thinks because he went to university in Manchester he can handle his drugs. Makes out he’s done this before. Five minutes later he’s emptied his stomach into the gutter and is on a total whitey, asking you to rub his back and whether he should go to A&E. F**king lightweight.

Elon Musk

The man practically lives in the K-hole, and that’s the problem. He’s crouched in there like Bigot Bilbo Baggins, taking in tweets, spewing out racist bullshit. With all his experience he should be a solid K-hang, but he’s become such a loathsome freak he’s impossible to bear for a second. Is going to claim he got kidnapped by aliens and ask you to back him up.