• by Gord Hotchkiss , Featured Contributor, March 4, 2025

It’s the worst time possible to open a Tesla dealership.

In Kelowna, the western Canadian city I live in, a new 30,000-square-foot Tesla dealership is scheduled to open its doors any day now.  When they do, I’m guessing business will not be brisk.

It takes a lot to get Canadians worked up (hockey games aside), but the Trump administration has managed to do something I haven’t seen before in my lifetime: uniting Canadians in a passionate rage. Between picking a totally unjustified trade war with us and continually threatening to make us a 51^st State, Donald Trump hasn’t made any friends in my country. By extension, that includes his hatchet/chainsaw man and the face of Tesla, Elon Musk.

This is not just happening here in Canada. Tesla owners are having a rough month everywhere. Their cars are being customized with swastikas. Their daily drive is regularly punctuated with middle finger salutes. They are being verbally accosted at Tesla charging stations. And, if they happen to have to go to their dealership, chances are very good that they’ll have to navigate past a pack of protesters. According to the website Actionnetwork.org, there are 101 TeslaTakedown protests scheduled across the U.S .and around the world in the next few weeks.

That is a dramatic turnaround for a car brand that singlehandedly made driving an electric vehicle cool. The TeslaTakedown campaign is urging drivers to dump their cars and shareholders to sell their stock. A recent survey out of the Netherlands says that one in three Tesla owners are considering selling.

This has nothing to do with whether Teslas are good cars or not. They’re the same vehicles they were six months ago. This is simply about branding -- and right now, the Tesla brand and Elon Musk are one and the same. That brand is not popular with the majority of the world right now, especially here in Canada.

While this is all playing out, it got me thinking about another car brand that got on the wrong side of politics 80 years ago. In 1945, Volkswagen was not the second largest car manufacturer in the world, as it is now. It was a shuttered factory in Wolfsburg, Germany that was set to be dismantled by the Allied occupiers, led by the British. 

Volkswagen was founded in 1937 by the Nazi Party’s German Labor Front as a prestige project to show that German workers could produce the world’s best “People’s Car” (which is literally what “Volkswagen” means). That vehicle would be the first prototype of the now much-loved Beetle that we of a certain age immediately associate with Volkswagen. In 1938, Hitler himself christened this the KdF-Wagen, which stood for “Kraft durch Freude” – Strength through Joy. Even the car’s name was a banner for Nazi propaganda.

Seven years later, it was a different story. The Wolfsburg factory was to be dismantled as part of the de-Nazification of German industry, and the equipment was to be sent to a British car manufacturer, but none of them wanted it.

But three things saved Volkswagen:

-              The design was solid. The wartime version of the VW – the Kubelwagen – was exceptionally reliable.

-              There was a desperate need for military transportation in the now-occupied zone and there was no manufacturer able to fulfill that need.

-              There was a factory ready to go, and a skilled workforce in danger of starving if they didn’t go back to work

These three things convinced the British trustees to reopen the Wolfsburg plant. By March of 1946, the plant was producing 1,000 cars a month.  In 1947, Volkswagen began exporting passenger vehicles to other European markets, including the Netherlands, Switzerland and Denmark. This export model became the Beetle in the form I first knew it.

By the end of the 1950’s, Volkswagen had expanded through Europe and was ready to take on the U.S., a market dominated by the Big Three (Ford, GM and Chrysler) domestic manufacturers. At the time, almost no imported vehicles were sold in America.

Thanks to an inspired “Think Small” advertising campaign created by copywriter Julian Koenig and Art Director Helmut Krone from Doyle Dane Bernbach, Volkswagen became the U.S.’s favorite import. The campaign used humor, honesty and irony to spark a love for the VW brand. This branding and the oil crisis of the 1970’s placed VW in the perfect position to capitalize on a sudden market for smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles.

In 1961, Volkswagen passed the 1 million vehicles manufactured per year milestone. By 1972, that had more than doubled to almost 2.2 million cars made per year. Three quarters of those were sold in export markets.

As I said, today the Volkswagen group is now the number 1 or 2 auto manufacturer in the world, depending on which yardstick you use (per unit sales or total revenue). It does fall short on the list of most valuable car companies in the world, based on market capitalization.

So, what is the most valuable car company in the world? Tesla.

For now, anyway.