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Carter Rabasa poses last week with his new Rivian R1S electric SUV in Seattle which he picked up after trading in a 2020 Tesla Model Y. (Photo courtesy of Carter Rabasa)
Carter Rabasa recognizes that the financials of trading in his 2020 Tesla don’t look great. But he thinks the optics of staying in the car were much worse.
Last week, the Seattle tech vet joined a growing legion of Tesla owners who are trading in their popular electric vehicles in a bid to disassociate themselves from the backlash around Elon Musk, the company’s CEO, and the political upheaval he’s become a part of in service to President Trump.
Along with the Tesla dealership protests and vandalism of cars making national headlines, more people than ever are choosing to trade in their Teslas. Of all vehicles traded at dealerships for new or used cars through March 16, 1.4% were Tesla cars from model year 2017 or newer — the highest share on record, The Washington Post reported, citing recent data from Edmunds, the national car shopping site. A year ago, 0.4% of all vehicles traded in were Teslas.
A representative at one Toyota dealership in the Seattle area said Tesla trade-ins are definitely on the rise. The dealership used to get maybe one or two a month and it’s now seeing five to eight in a month. There are also hundreds of the cars listed for sale on Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace and elsewhere in the Seattle area.
It will take some effort to make a dent in the number of Teslas on Seattle-area roadways. The Seattle Times reported earlier this year that households in the area are 130% more likely to have a Tesla than the national average, making it the region’s most overrepresented car ahead of Subaru.
A Tesla on the road on a rainy night in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Rabasa, a startup founder and now head of developer relations at DataStax, likened the heat around Musk and the Tesla brand to a slow boil that started many months ago.
“In the aftermath of the swearing in, and DOGE and that stuff, it seems like the temperature got dialed up really, really high, with people’s cars actually being vandalized, people being threatened,” Rabasa said. “I’ve got a wife and family. I don’t want to wait for something to happen. I don’t want my kids to be traumatized. I don’t want my property to be damaged. It felt like it was irresponsible to hold onto it.”
More than five years ago, Rabasa put down a deposit and pre-ordered his Tesla Model Y after previously owning a Model S. He was among the first to take delivery of the new EV in 2020. At nearly $70,000, it was by far the most expensive car he’d ever owned.
“I thought we’d drive it for like 10 or 15 years,” he said.
Instead, he was driven to get rid of it.
“If I had sold it a year ago, I would have gotten, who knows, maybe $30,000 or $35,000 or something,” Rabasa said. “But because a lot of people are trying to unload these cars, it’s like a supply-and-demand situation where the value has completely fallen off a cliff.”
After first getting a quote for $18,000 from online used car retailer Carvana, Rabasa reached out to Rivian about a trade. He was offered $23,000, and he took it. And even though shares of Tesla are down more than 25% this year, he used proceeds from the sale of his stock at peak pricing to help lease a Rivian R1S SUV.
“It kind of felt like poetic justice, to use the stock gains of Tesla to purchase a Rivian,” he said.
And he doesn’t feel any guilt about getting out of a long-range, reliable EV that is good for the environment, not just because of his feelings toward Musk, but because Tesla is no longer the only game in town.
“There are plenty of other companies that are producing the exact same kind of product, not just Rivian,” Rabasa said. “I have a neighbor that bought a Polestar. I have other neighbors and friends that bought EV Kias. So I just think that at this point there isn’t any need to support [Tesla] anymore.”
Tired of being flipped off
Matt McCain gives a thumbs down to his Tesla Model 3, left, and a thumbs up for the Toyota Prius he traded for over the weekend. (Photos courtesy of Matt McCain)
Before he bought his Tesla Model 3 in 2022, Matt McCain was commuting 50 miles a day from Woodinville, Wash., to Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood in a gas-powered Toyota Tacoma, and feeling pretty guilty about it.
“I’m a very environmentally conscious person and here I am just burning fossil fuel,” McCain said. “So I bit the bullet and bought a Tesla, and I loved it. They’re so fun to drive, and it made my commute guilt-free for a long time.”
But the guilt returned with the rise of the Musk backlash.
“Last week, I got verbally accosted at the same intersection by my office two days in a row,” said McCain, a founder at Seattle creative ad agency Little Hands of Stone, which recently became DNA&STONE through a merger. “I got flipped off by his guy riding a scooter who yelled, ‘Fuck you, Nazi car!’ And the very next day, at the next intersection, I got an arm out the window of a car, ‘Fuck you, Elon!’”
By Sunday, McCain was at a Toyota dealership in Kirkland, where he traded his Tesla for a plug-in hybrid Prius.
“I knew my financial hit was going to be bad,” he said, referencing the Model 3’s $15,000 trade-in value. He owed $19,000 on the $48,000 car. “The values of these cars are are only going to go down. It was brutal, but I made my decision.”
While signing his paperwork at the Toyota dealership, he was told that a lot of dealerships in the area are likely to have a tough time getting rid of Teslas because people are offloading them so quickly.
“He’s just doing such awful stuff that I can’t be any part of supporting him economically,” McCain said of Musk. “My idea was if I can make the value of his cars drop even more by selling mine, that makes me feel good.”
Asked about his first drive to Capitol Hill in his new Prius, McCain said no one flipped him off.
“Nobody gives a shit about a Prius,” he laughed.
Cybertruck owner stands by his ride
Javier Luraschi poses with his Tesla Cybertruck a year ago, after taking delivery of the vehicle in Seattle. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)
Javier Luraschi views Tesla’s mission as bigger than any one person — even the world’s richest, no matter his politics.
And because of that, Luraschi doesn’t want to give up on the Tesla Cybertruck that he loves driving.
A tech veteran who heads up Hal9, a 3-year-old AI-enhanced data analytics startup, Lurashci was positively giddy when he brought his Cybertruck by the GeekWire offices a year ago to offer me a test ride.
A friendly person with a genuine curiosity about how people viewed his truck, he spent that day showing it off, letting people sit in it and serving as an unofficial Tesla ambassador, taking in stride the barbs about the vehicle’s odd appearance.
He calls the current backlash around the brand and its CEO “super frustrating and sad.” He views Tesla as a great company that is trying to do its best to transition us to sustainable energy, not just with cars but with batteries, charging stations, solar panels and more.
“It’s the same product. Nothing has changed,” Luraschi said. “The only thing that changed was Elon’s different mission. He’s not even working at Tesla anymore, from my point of view.”
Luraschi drives the truck every day. He uses it to commute from Carnation to Duvall, where his startup is renting new office space. He does kid pickups and drop-offs, and he uses the truck to go skiing with his son and friends at Crystal Mountain.
“I do get people that flip the finger while I’m driving it. I get people that confront me,” he said, adding that someone scrawled “Dick” on the back panel of the dirty truck. “They’re putting people like me in danger. They’re putting my family in danger.”
Luraschi said the hate is misplaced and protesting and trying to shut down Tesla isn’t going to fix any national political divide.
“I believe we need to fix the root problem. The car is not causing the political problems,” he said. “The easy path for me would be to say, ‘It’s just a car, sell it.’ But I don’t believe in that. I stand by my decisions and my values and I’m going to keep it.”
