Four Tesla Cybertrucks burned overnight in a lot near 4th Avenue and Spokane Street in Seattle. The lot serves as a temporary storage space for Teslas arriving from overseas before they are sent to dealerships.

This incident comes after a series of attacks on Tesla vehicles and facilities across the country since the Trump inauguration. Elon Musk, an early investor, board member, and current CEO of Tesla, has taken a role in the Trump administration.

These attacks have ranged from graffiti and vandalism at dealerships to arson and reports of gunfire at Tesla locations, including a recent incident in Portland.

While covering the story for Seattle’s Morning News, a man approached KIRO Newsradio’s Luke Duecy and pulled out what appeared to be a knife.

“He decided to come up to me right before I came on air and tried to get me to leave, essentially. And then I told him “No.” And that’s when I saw this person reach in the back behind like a belt or something and pull something metallic out underneath, and I went “oh,” and there were unfortunately a lot of bad language between the two of us.

“That was a scary moment as well. But you know, obviously someone does not want us to be here and to show these vehicles, but that’s in fact what we’re doing.”

    • pivot_root@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      I’m generally not one to believe in conspiracies, but this would actually have an excellent motivation. Elon would get to claw back the money lost of producing an undesired rust bucket through insurance claims while simultaneously getting to act like the victim of big bad scary librul’ protests turned violent.

      • spooky2092@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 hours ago

        And then he pays higher insurance premiums and likely will still lose money because that’s how insurance companies operate

    • Arsecroft@lemmy.sdf.org
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      19 hours ago

      not to be conspiratorial, but i wonder how difficult it would be to trigger this remotely

      edit: i just read he was cutting off funding for bomb sniffing dogs, i wonder if its just that he wants to keep the money